Great director know for Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Born: April 13, 1924;

Died: February 21, 2019

STANLEY Donen, who has died aged 94, was one of the greatest and most innovative directors of film musicals, including On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Funny Face; he later made several highly regarded comedy/dramas, such as Charade, Arabesque and Two for the Road; he was generally reckoned the last surviving major director of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952), like On the Town (1949) and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), were co-directed with Gene Kelly and, like Kelly, Donen had begun his career as a Broadway dancer and choreographer. The pair had a complicated relationship – both those who worked on their pictures and critics contested who had the greater impact – compounded by the fact that both men married the dancer Jeanne Coyne (Donen from 1948-51, and Kelly from 1960-73).

Donen was generally seen as having hero-worshipped Kelly, and to have got his early break through his collaborations with him. Debbie Reynolds said dismissively and inaccurately (of Singin’ in the Rain): “Stanley just operated the camera, because Stanley didn’t dance.”

Though there was no doubt that Donen was not in Kelly’s league as a dancer or choreographer, this judgment was probably the wrong way round: Donen’s solo outings as a director were much more commercially and aesthetically successful than Kelly’s. Indeed, Kelly’s Hello, Dolly! (1969), a flop on release, is usually considered the film that killed the traditional Hollywood musical.

The truth is probably that Kelly’s primary input was choreographic and Donen’s innovations camerawork and editing. Hollywood had previously dealt with the conventions of the Broadway musical with films that featured a show within the film: the “backstage” musical, of which 42nd Street was the outstanding example.

But for Comden & Green and Bernstein’s On the Town, Donen set the opening number, New York, New York, on the streets of the city, shooting on location (sometimes with hidden cameras) and providing, as one critic put it, the first musical captured “with and for film, rather than on film”; it was also the first to dispense with the chorus. The rapid cuts, reversed and 360º shots and outdoor crane work were wholly novel techniques for a musical, and an influence on the French nouvelle vague of the 1960s. And, though Kelly was the star and staged the dance numbers, the studio regarded Donen as the director.

Stanley Donen was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on April 13 1924, the son of Mordecai Donen, who worked in the rag trade, and his wife Helen (née Cohen). He was an avid movie fan from an early age and, after being impressed by the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio (1933), began dance lessons.

After a term at university, Donen dropped out and in 1940 moved to New York to become a dancer, joining the chorus of the original production of Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey, in which Kelly was the lead. He got on well with George Abbott, the director, and worked as a choreographer and stage manager on other musicals before joining MGM as choreographer for Best Foot Forward (1943), in which he also appeared. At Kelly’s invitation, he did the dance direction for Cover Girl (1944) and the following year’s Anchors Aweigh, where he devised the animated sequence in which Kelly dances with Jerry the mouse.

The success of On the Town landed Donen, then just 25, a contract as a director with MGM, for whom his first picture was Royal Wedding, starring Astaire and featuring an innovative sequence in which he dances across the walls and ceiling of a room, an effect achieved by mounting the entire set in a revolving cylinder.

Singin’ in the Rain, now widely regarded as perhaps the greatest musical, and one of the greatest films, ever made, was no more than a modest success on its release in 1952. That year, he also made Fearless Fagan and then, in 1953, Give a Girl a Break, on which he worked with Bob Fosse, who also assisted Michael Kidd with the highly inventive choreography on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, one of the biggest films of 1954.

Donen’s relationship with Kelly deteriorated during their third directing collaboration, It’s Always Fair Weather, but he won plaudits for his next two musicals, Funny Face, starring Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, and The Pajama Game (both 1957, the latter with Abbott, and choreographed by Fosse). Both were made for Paramount, after Donen had escaped his contract with MGM.

He became an independent producer and director, and branched out from musicals with Indiscreet (1958), starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, though that year he also directed Damn Yankees! (again with Abbott and Fosse). Indiscreet was filmed in London, which Donen then made his base; musicals had fallen from fashion, and his remaining films were in a range of genres.

The Grass is Greener (1960) featured Grant and Deborah Kerr and in 1963, Donen again turned to Grant, this time with Audrey Hepburn, for Charade, a brilliant caper movie set in Paris. It was a commercial and critical success, and Donen followed it with Arabesque (1966), which starred Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren and strived, less successfully, to capture a similar tone.

Two for the Road (1967), scripted by Frederic Raphael and starring Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, was an extremely stylish portrait of a marriage, cutting across four separate holidays in France; the same year’s Bedazzled a rather misfiring attempt to transfer Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to the big screen in a Swinging London version of the Faust story, though it was a commercial success. Staircase (1969) starred Rex Harrison and Richard Burton as a gay couple, and fared badly at the box office.

Lucky Lady (1975) and Movie Movie (1978) were also flops, but Donen put both in the shade with Saturn 3 (1980), a science fiction picture starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel, and scripted by Martin Amis, which many regard as one of the worst films ever released. Donen’s last picture for the big screen was Blame it on Rio (1984), a disappointing romance that starred Michael Caine and also did badly. His later work included directing the televised Academy Awards (1986), the video for Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, and several stage productions.

Stanley Donen won an honorary Oscar in 1998 and an honorary Golden Lion at Cannes in 2004. He married and divorced five times: to Jeanne Coyne; Marion Marshall, with whom he had two sons (1952-59); Adelle Beatty, with whom he had a son (1960-71); Yvette Mimieux (1972-85) and Pamela Braden (1990-94). His partner from 1999 until his death was the writer, director and comedian Elaine May, who survives him with two of his sons.

ANDREW MCKIE