Angelina Jolie was born in the mid-1970s to the actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand at a turning point in cinematic history. The New Hollywood movement had well and truly taken hold of American filmmaking, and Voight was one of its most prominent poster children having starred in films like Coming Home, Midnight Cowboy, and Deliverance.
Jolie, meanwhile, made her film debut when she was seven in Hal Ashby’s 1982 film Lookin’ to Get Out, which starred her father, but she quickly made her own way in the industry.
In the late ’90s, she became a star in her own right, thanks to films like The Bone Collector and Girl, Interrupted. By the early 2000s, she was one of the most famous faces in the business, taking on a wide range of usually action-oriented roles.
With this background, she doesn’t seem like the type of person who would revere Old Hollywood. Actors in her parents’ generation were largely defined in opposition to the stars of the 1940s and ’50s, and she herself was part of a whole new cohort of luminaries that was a step beyond that. And yet, the Lara Croft star has a surprising love for Fred Astaire, the dancer-turned-actor known for his spate of musicals with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s.
However, Jolie’s favourite film of his is from later in his career. In fact, when Astaire was approached to star in 1948’s Easter Parade, he was on the cusp of turning 50 and had been retired for two years. Gene Kelly had originally been set to star in it but had to drop out due to a broken ankle. The film stars Astaire as a nightclub performer torn between his long-time dance partner and a younger one with whom he becomes romantically involved.
In an interview with the American Film Institute, Jolie said, “One of my favourite scenes is the beginning when he goes into the store. This little kid’s going to get a bunny… and he decides to convince him to get a drum set. And so he does this amazing, amazing… just this dance kind of all over the place with this drum set to convince this kid to buy it. But it’s – you just watch that, and you just can’t believe that a human being can do that.”
Even compared to Astaire’s remarkable body of work, ‘Drum Crazy’ is a jaw-dropping number. He never did the type of athletic dancing that Gene Kelly was known for. He opted for impossibly smooth, graceful work that he executed so flawlessly that it looked effortless. In ‘Drum Crazy’, he tap dances while kicking drums at just the right intervals. At one point, he even lies on the floor and continues to tap dance with his feet while hitting the drum with his head.
The film marked the beginning of a new chapter in Astaire’s career. After the success of Easter Parade, he became a star of the new wave of 1950s Technicolor musicals, appearing in a string of hits including Daddy Long Legs and Funny Face, the latter of which paired him with Audrey Hepburn. He enjoyed yet another on-screen reinvention a decade later when he began starring in non-musical films. On the Beach, The Towering Inferno, and a guest appearance on Battlestar Galactica were a far cry from his Top Hat days and proved just how beloved he was as a performer all the way through the ’70s.
