The 1940s and ’50s were the golden era for Hollywood musicals and no filmmaker contributed more to the magic than Donen.
LOS ANGELES — Filmmaker Stanley Donen, a giant of the Hollywood musical who through such classics as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Funny Face” helped give us some of the most joyous sounds and images in movie history, has died. He was 94.
Donen, who often teamed with Gene Kelly but also worked with Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, died Thursday in New York from heart failure, his sons Joshua and Mark Donen confirmed Saturday.
The 1940s and ’50s were the prime era for Hollywood musicals and no filmmaker contributed more to the magic than Donen, among the last survivors from that era and one willing to extend the limits of song and dance into the surreal. He was part of the unit behind such unforgettable scenes as Kelly dancing with an animated Jerry the mouse in “Anchors Aweigh,” Astaire’s gravity-defying spin across the ceiling in “Royal Wedding,” and, the all-time triumph, Kelly ecstatically splashing about as he performs the title number in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
In this file photo taken on March 23,1998, director Stanley Donen poses with his Oscar for Lifetime Achievement at the 70th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles. – Donen, one of the last Hollywood Golden Age stars, has died at the age of 94.| HAL GARB/AFP/Getty Images
Steven Spielberg recalled Donen as a “friend and early mentor” for whom life and film were inseparable.
“His generosity in giving over so many of his weekends in the late 60’s to film students like me to learn about telling stories and placing lenses and directing actors is a time I will never forget,” Spielberg said on Saturday.
The filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said, “Before Stanley Donen actors sang, actors danced. He made the camera dance and the colors sing.”
A 2007 American Film Institute survey of the top 100 American movies ranked “Singin’ in the Rain,” with its inventive take on Hollywood’s transition from silent to talking pictures in the 1920s and Kelly’s famous dance in a downpour, at No. 5.
Donen was asked in 2002 whether the filmmakers knew that “Singin’ in the Rain,” released in 1952 and also starring Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, would be revered decades later.
“You can’t get through a movie if you don’t think it’s good,” he told The Associated Press. “Certainly we thought it was good. More than that? I don’t know. You don’t think about that. You just think about how you can do it.”
Both the film and Donen were at first underrated. “Singin’ in the Rain” was initially seen as high entertainment rather than art and was not even nominated for a best picture or directing Academy Award.
