Fred Astaire insisted that dance be filmed in a single unbroken take showing the entire body, refusing the cutting that would let a double substitute, and that rule shaped the American musical for thirty years.
He made ten films with Ginger Rogers, and Top Hat is the best of them. The famous line about her doing everything backwards in heels is not his but describes the arrangement accurately.
A famous early screen test report reportedly read that he could not act, could not sing, and could dance a little. He worked into his eighties, including a dramatic nomination for The Towering Inferno.
