| Busby Berkeley  AKA William Berkeley Enos
Born: 29-Nov-1895
Birthplace: Los Angeles, CA
Died: 14-Mar-1976
Location of death: Palm Springs, CA
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Desert Memorial Park, Cathedral City, CA
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Film Director Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Strike Up the Band Military service: US Army (1918-20; to Lieutenant; choreographer for stage shows) Stage and film choreographer and director Busby Berkeley took the Hollywood musical — where exuberant excess was the standard — to its greatest heights of bizarre, hallucinogenic dance, with elaborately overwrought, often hilarious musical numbers. His father was a stage director and his mother an actress, and he was raised in poverty and perpetually on the road. He began appearing on stage as a singer and actor when he was about five years old. In the military during World War I he was assigned to choreograph stage shows to bolster the troops' morale, and after the war he worked on and behind the professional stage in Canada and New England, making his way toward Broadway. His first major success on the stage was the premiere of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1927 musical spin on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee, which ran almost a year. He made his movie debut in 1930, when star Eddie Cantor asked him to come west and stage the choreography for Whoopee!. His real mark on movies came when he gained enough clout to not merely choreograph the dance numbers, but direct their filming.
The movie musical was in its infancy when Berkeley arrived in Hollywood, and the standard had been to film musical numbers much as they had been seen by the audience in a playhouse, with stationary cameras. Berkeley's innovation was to make the camera dance, moving it around the dancers as they performed, and even drilling holes in the ceiling to mount cameras that could film dazzling kaleidoscopic dance sequences from above. He circumvented the censorship of his time by introducing sexual themes abstractly, as the censors could hardly object to giant dancing bananas or enormous zipperlike contraptions coming untethered. He staged his scenes with wild abandon, a sense of wonder and a sense of humor, and even generations later it is nearly impossible to watch his work without smiling or even laughing.
His staging of 1933's 42nd Street revitalized the musical genre and rescued the Warners studio from bankruptcy. His other famous cinematic moments came in Palmy Days, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1935, and Gold Diggers of 1937, and later at a lower budget in The Gang's All Here. After leaving Warners he directed dance sequences at MGM, including three movies starring the young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and two featuring the water-ski and swimming dances of Esther Williams. His style faded from popularity in the late 1940s and '50s, and his latter work was less spectacular and less well-received. His last film was the 1962 Doris Day elephant comedy Jumbo.
Berkeley's personal life was troubled and tragic. He was a very heavy drinker, and according to legend he spent much of his time between films drinking martinis in his bathtub. He was charged with second-degree murder (but acquitted) after an 8 September 1935 three-car collision on California's Pacific Coast Highway that left three people dead, amid claims that Berkeley was drunk at the scene. He was married and divorced at least six times, always to actresses, but he maintained an unusually close relationship with his mother. Her took her last name as his stage name, she lived with him until her death in 1946, and a month after her passing he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and then slashing his wrists. In his own personal favorite film work, the staging of "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935, the song ends with a woman leaping to her death from a skyscraper. He never took or taught dance lessons, and never danced professionally. For his film work he was Oscar-nominated three times, but never won. Father: Wilson Enos (stage director)
Mother: Gertrude Berkeley (actress, b. 24-Jun-1864, m. 17-Jun-1891, d. 15-Jun-1946)
Brother: George Enos (actor)
Wife: Esther Muir (actress, b. 11-Mar-1903, m. 1929, div. 1931, d. 1-Aug-1995)
Wife: Merna Kennedy (actress, b. 7-Sep-1908, m. 1934 , div. 1936, d. 20-Dec-1944)
Wife: Claire James (actress, b. 23-Apr-1920, m. 29-Mar-1942, annulled Mar-1943, d. 18-Aug-1986)
Wife: Myra Steffens (actress, div.)
Mistress: Carole Landis (actress, b. 1-Jan-1919, affair 1938-39, d. 5-Jul-1948)
Wife: Marge Pemberton (actress, m. 1945, div. 1945)
Wife: Etta Dunn (actress, m. 23-Jun-1958 until his death)
High School: Mohegan Lake Military Academy, Peekskill, NY (1914)
Warner Bros. 1933-39
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1939-43
Driving While Intoxicated 8-Sep-1935
Murder 1935 (2nd degree; acquitted)
Suicide Attempt 17-Jul-1946
Drug Overdose 17-Jul-1946
Institutionalized Los Angeles
Irish Ancestry Maternal
Scottish Ancestry Maternal
Risk Factors: Alcoholism
FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (9-Mar-1949)
Cinderella Jones (9-Mar-1946)
The Gang's All Here (24-Dec-1943)
Girl Crazy (26-Nov-1943)
For Me and My Gal (21-Oct-1942)
Babes on Broadway (31-Dec-1941)
Ziegfeld Girl (25-Apr-1941)
Strike Up the Band (27-Sep-1940)
Forty Little Mothers (18-Apr-1940)
Babes in Arms (13-Oct-1939)
Fast and Furious (6-Oct-1939)
They Made Me a Criminal (21-Jan-1939)
Comet Over Broadway (3-Dec-1938)
Garden of the Moon (23-Sep-1938)
Men Are Such Fools (15-Jun-1938)
Hollywood Hotel (20-Dec-1937)
The Go-Getter (22-May-1937)
Stage Struck (12-Sep-1936)
I Live for Love (28-Sep-1935)
Bright Lights (27-Jul-1935)
Gold Diggers of 1935 (15-Mar-1935)
Dames (16-Aug-1934)
She Had to Say Yes (15-Jul-1933)
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The Phynx (6-May-1970) · Himself
Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2019 Soylent Communications
|
