Throwback Thursday and Vivien Fay
Dancer Vivien (or Vivian) Fay’s name
shows up frequently in early movie credits, but little seems to be known for
certain about her.
She is believed to have been born on
January 16, 1912 in San Francisco. Or, some sources say she was born in Lubbock
Texas on May 13, 1908. She trained at Theodore Kosloff’s ballet studio in San
Francisco, and made her professional debut in a children’s vaudeville act.
Although not listed in the credits, she
is said to have performed in the original 1928 Broadway production of Rosalie. Other Broadway credits include:
Vanities of 1930, Music Hall Varieties (1932),
Melody (1933), and The Great Waltz (1934-35). Due to her
ballet training, she was often cast as a “specialty dancer”.
She then moved on to Hollywood films,
such as The Lottery Lover (1935), and
to what is probably her best known dance number in the Marx Brother’s film A Day at the Races (1937), where she
dances en pointe (see today’s Link of the Day). After that she appeared in many
movies with such notables as Abbot and Costello, Peg Leg Bates, Bela Lugosi and
others. Her last movie seems to have been the 1945 musical A Song for Miss Julie.
She died more than sixty years later on
August 10, 2007 in Northridge, California.
From the Big
Blue Book of Ballet Secrets
Dance History Secret #218:
“Vivien Fay was a dancer in many films, but little is
known about her.”
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