page_title: Eleanor Powell
section_title: Decline in popularity
hierarchical_section_title: Eleanor Powell / Decline in popularity
caption_attribution_description: Poster for the 1942 film Ship Ahoy!
context_page_description: Eleanor Torrey Powell was an American dancer and actress. Best remembered for her tap dance numbers in musical films in the 1930s and 1940s, Powell began studying ballet when she was six and was dancing at nightclubs in Atlantic City before she was a teenager. At the age of sixteen, she began studying tap and started appearing in musical revues on Broadway. She made her Hollywood debut as a featured dancer in the movie George White's Scandals.
  She was known as one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's top dancing stars during the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in a series of musical vehicles tailored especially for her talents, including Born to Dance, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Rosalie. In 1965, she was named the World’s Greatest Tap Dancer by the Dance Masters of America.
context_section_description: Following Broadway Melody of 1940 Powell was sidelined for many months following a gall stone operation and things changed somewhat for the worse, at least as far as Powell's movie career was concerned. Lady Be Good (1941) gave Powell top billing and a classic dance routine to "Fascinatin' Rhythm". The same happened with Red Skelton in Ship Ahoy (1942) and I Dood It (1943), although in Ship Ahoy her character nonetheless played a central role in the story, and Powell's dance skills were put to practical use when she manages to tap out a Morse code message to a secret agent in the middle of a dance routine. In another routine from Ship Ahoy, she dances to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Buddy Rich on drums and the two perform a great musical partnership with the number "Tallulah". She was signed to play opposite Dan Dailey in For Me and My Gal in 1942, but the two actors were removed from the picture during rehearsals and replaced by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Later, production of a new Broadway Melody film that would have paired Powell with Kelly was also cancelled.
  She parted with MGM in 1943 after her next film, Thousands Cheer, in which she appeared only for a few minutes to perform a specialty number (as part of an all-star cast), and the same year married actor Glenn Ford. She danced in a giant pinball machine in Sensations of 1945 (1944) for United Artists, but the film  was a critical and commercial disappointment. Her performance was overshadowed by what was to be the final film appearance of W. C. Fields. She then retired to concentrate on raising her son, Peter Ford, who was born that year. She appeared in a couple of documentary-style short subjects about celebrities in the late 1940s. Overseas audiences did get to see one additional Powell dance performance in 1946, however: the compilation The Great Morgan included a number that had been cut from Honolulu.
  In 1950, Powell returned to MGM one last time in Duchess of Idaho, starring Esther Williams. Appearing as herself in a nightclub scene, a hesitant Powell is invited to dance by bandleader Dick Layne (Van Johnson). She begins with a staid, almost balletic performance until she is chided by Layne for being lazy. She then strips off her skirt, revealing her famous legs, and  performs a "boogie-woogie"-style specialty number very similar to the one she performed in Thousands Cheer seven years earlier. Williams, in her autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid, writes of being touched, watching Powell rehearsing until her feet bled, in order to make her brief appearance as perfect as possible.
caption: Ship Ahoy poster, 1942
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