Ginger Rogers

Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer whose 60-year career produced multiple defining 1930s American film roles — particularly her 10-film dance-musical partnership with Fred Astaire across 1933–1939 and her 1940 Best Actress Academy Award win for Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle. She was born Virginia Katherine McMath on July 16, 1911, in Independence, Missouri. Her father William Eddins McMath was an electrical engineer and her mother Lela Emogene Owens was a screenwriter and theatrical agent. The family relocated to Fort Worth, Texas, when Ginger was nine.

Her 1925 first vaudeville appearance — at age 14, after her Charleston-dance contest victory at the 1925 Texas state Charleston-dance championships in Fort Worth — launched her late-1920s American vaudeville touring career. Her 1929 Broadway debut at age 18 in the musical Top Speed and her 1930 lead role in George Gershwin's Broadway musical Girl Crazy (alongside fellow newcomer Ethel Merman) launched her early-1930s American film career.

Her 1933 first dance-musical partnership with Fred Astaire — across the 1933 RKO Radio Pictures film Flying Down to Rio (in which she and Astaire performed "The Carioca" dance sequence) — launched the 1933–1939 Astaire-Rogers RKO dance-musical sequence. Their nine subsequent RKO dance musicals — The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Carefree (1938), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), and the subsequent 1949 reunion film The Barkleys of Broadway — produced one of the defining 20th-century film dance partnerships.

Her 1940 lead role as working-class Philadelphia department-store-saleswoman Kitty Foyle in Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle (the Christopher Morley-novel adaptation) — won her the 1941 Best Actress Academy Award. Her subsequent 1940s and 1950s career produced multiple defining American films — particularly The Major and the Minor (1942, Billy Wilder's first directed film), I'll Be Seeing You (1944), and Monkey Business (1952). She died on April 25, 1995, at age 83, in Rancho Mirage, California.

Her name Ginger began as her childhood nickname (drawn from her younger cousin's mispronunciation of "Virginia"). Ginger has been a popular American girls' name across the 20th century.