Hermes Pan (choreographer)
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Hermes Pan (December 10, 1909 – September 19, 1990) was an American dancer and choreographer, principally celebrated as Fred Astaire's choreographic collaborator on the famous 1930s movie musicals starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Pan was born Hermes Pangiotopolous in Nashville, Tennessee, of Greek and Irish extraction. He was raised Catholic by his mother, the former Mary Houston. His career began with an appearance as a chorus boy in 1928 in the Marx Brothers Broadway production of Animal Crackers, and he also performed in a dance partnership with his sister Vasso, who subsequently appeared in the chorus of many of the Astaire-Rogers pictures. He first met Ginger Rogers in 1930, when he appeared as a chorus singer in the Broadway musical Top Speed.
He met Fred Astaire, whom he physically resembled, on the set of Flying Down to Rio (1933), in which he worked as an assistant to dance director Dave Gould. After Pan suggested an ingenious solution to a problem Astaire had run into in "The Carioca" number, the two began a lifelong professional collaboration and friendship which included all the RKO Astaire pictures, including A Damsel in Distress (1937) in which Ginger Rogers did not appear, and for which he was awarded the 1937 Academy Award for Best Dance Direction. He had previously received Academy Award nominations for the "Top Hat" and "The Piccolino" numbers from Top Hat (1935) and for the "Bojangles of Harlem"' number from Swing Time (1936).
The Astaire-Pan collaboration, involving 17 out of Astaire's 31 musical films and three of his four television specials, is widely accepted as one of the most important forces in dance choreography of 20th century film and television musicals. Astaire called Pan his "ideas man", and while he generally choreographed his own routines, and sometimes worked with other choreographers, he greatly valued the assistance of Pan not just as a source and critic of ideas, but also as a rehearsal partner for the purposes of fine-tuning a routine.
Given Astaire's obsessive rehearsal habits, this was no mean task. Pan also performed the essential function of rehearsing Ginger Rogers, whose many other commitments during the filming of the Astaire-Rogers musicals often conflicted with Astaire's rehearsal schedule. In addition, he recorded Ginger's taps in post production.
Pan continued to collaborate with Astaire right up until the latter's last musical picture: Finian's Rainbow (1968), which was a disaster on a number of fronts, not least for Pan himself. The young director Francis Ford Coppola had no prior experience of film or stage musicals, and proceeded to ride roughshod over Astaire and Pan's plans for the film's dance routines, reintroducing the style of dancing camera of the early 1930s which Astaire had done so much to banish from the Hollywood musical. Eventually, Coppola fired Pan - who has a small walk-on part in the film - and has since acknowledged his primary responsibility for the film's artistic failure.
Pan's first on-screen appearance is as a clarinetist during the Astaire-Goddard routine "I Ain't Hep To That Step But I'll Dig It" in Second Chorus (1940), and dressed as The Ghost in the deleted (and only) Astaire-Pan routine "Me and the Ghost Upstairs" from the same film. He appeared uncredited with Betty Grable in Moon Over Miami (1942) and with Rita Hayworth in My Gal Sal (1942).
In both films he had non-speaking dancing roles.
When not working with Astaire, Pan was much in demand as a choreographer throughout the golden age of the Hollywood musical, most notably in Lovely To Look At (1952) and Kiss Me, Kate (1953).
He won an Emmy Award for the 1958 television special An Evening with Fred Astaire and was recognized with a National Film Award in 1980, and by the Joffrey Ballet in 1986.
He died on September 19, 1990, aged 80 from undisclosed causes.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Fred Astaire: Steps in Time, 1959, multiple reprints.
- Garson Kanin: Together Again! The Stories of the Great Hollywood Teams, Doubleday, 1981.
- John Mueller: Astaire Dancing - The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, Knopf 1985, ISBN 0-394-51654-0
