Fred Astaire wonderfully took up skateboarding in his 70s: “Intrigued by it”
The Golden Age of Hollywood was a time of lavish glamour in the film industry. Movies, stars, and news were all created within the insular studio system, ensuring that celebrity culture was curated to within an inch of its life. The movie stars of this era were impossibly polished. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and everyone else seemed almost otherworldly, and when their time came to cede the spotlight to younger stars, they usually went gracefully.
Some Old Hollywood actors faded into comfortable obscurity or died at relatively early ages. Others continued acting in guest star capacities, gracing the little pictures of the modern era with their gargantuan old-school star power. One thing they rarely did was move with the times. Why would you, when you’d spent your youth as the next best thing to a deity?
Outside of acting, however, some of these stars did embrace the modern world. Fred Astaire, who had risen to fame as a Vaudeville dancer and embodied the impossible grace of Hollywood musicals in the 1930s and ’40s, took up skateboarding in his later years, finding it to be an exciting new pursuit that dove-tailed perfectly with his skillset.
Astaire will always be known for the ten musicals he made with Ginger Rogers, including 1935’s Top Hat and 1937’s Shall We Dance. He retired several times – once in the 1940s and again several years later. However, he eventually returned to acting with films like Funny Face and Francis Ford Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow before branching out into non-musical roles with The Towering Inferno and On the Beach. He ended up working all the way into the 1980s.
In 1970, he retired from dancing professionally. He was a famous perfectionist, working tirelessly to master every last step of a dance routine. The idea of looking elderly on-screen went against his ethos as a performer, so he resolved to stick with non-musical roles. Skateboarding, however, was not off-limits, at least recreationally. At the age of 77, Astaire began to dabble in the new-fangled pursuit of California beach bums and found that it suited him perfectly.
During an appearance on the Merv Griffin Show, the septuagenarian explained that he’d taken to the sport after his grandchildren showed him their boards, revealing that he was currently practising every day. One need only see his roller skate dance routine with Rogers in Shall We Dance to understand why he might be the ideal candidate for the activity. His daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, told the BBC that his passion for the pursuit ran deep. “He was intrigued by it and thought that skateboarding would be a great thing,” she said, adding, “If skateboards had turned up earlier, he might have incorporated them into his film routines.”
It turned out to be a short-lived love affair, though. After earning a lifetime membership to the National Skateboard Society, Astaire slipped and broke his wrist while practising in his driveway. He was 78. “Gene Kelly warned me not to be a damned fool,” he remarked. “But I’d seen the things those kids got up to on television doing all sorts of tricks. What a routine I could have worked up for a film sequence if they had existed a few years ago.” It’s an irresistible image and, sadly, one that will only ever exist in the imagination.
