Famous Pittsburghers: Gene Kelly

Born on August 23, 1912 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gene Kelly was an American film actor and director whose athletic style and classical ballet technique transformed the film musical.

While he often was compared to another famous film dancer, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly had his own unique style. He brought dance into real life in his movies, performing largely in regular clothes and in common settings. "All of my dancing came out of the idea of the common man," Kelly once explained. He also produced some of film's most innovative and enthusiastic dance numbers, pushing the limits of the genre.

He boldly blended solo dancing, mass movement and offbeat camera angles to tell a story in purely visual terms. Kelly is remembered for his lead role in Singin' in the Rain, regarded by some as the best dance film ever made.

Famous Pittsburghers, Playwright August Wilson

“YOU CAN’T WRITE PLAYS WITHOUT KNOWING THE CRAFT OF PLAYWRITING. ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR TOOLS, THEN YOU STILL GOTTA CREATE OUT OF THAT THING, THAT IMPULSE.” 

Wilson wrote scathingly about racism, yes, in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," and the indelible scars of slavery, in "The Piano Lesson" and "Gem of the Ocean." He also wrote about the Oedipal conflict of fathers and sons ("Fences") and the universal quest for the easy score ("Two Trains Running"). His concerns were as multifaceted as the hard-pressed people he wrote about.

Born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—in an impoverished neighborhood known as the Hill—the playwright was one of six siblings. Dropping out of high school after a teacher’s racist accusation that he had plagiarized a paper, Wilson soon became a poet under the inspirational aegis of Dylan Thomas and Amiri Baraka. He began writing plays in the 1970s after a brief stint with the Black Horizons Theatre. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom caught the attention of Yale Drama School’s Dean Lloyd Richards in 1982, which led Wilson to the Great White Way. He swiftly kicked its ass: the playwright has been awarded Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards for both Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1988).

Famous Pittsburghers: Lena Horne

Lena Horne: Cotton Club 1956

Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Since the US Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black US soldiers and white German POWs. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws

Famous Pittsburghers: Martha Graham (1894-1991)

Martha Graham was born in 1894 in a small city outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father was an "alienist," the term then used to describe a physician who specialized in human psychology. Dr. Graham was particularly interested in the way people used their bodies, an interest that he passed on to his eldest daughter. In later years, Martha Graham often repeated her father's dictum: "movement never lies."

Though the dances Graham created in the late 1920s were derivative of Denishawn pieces, by 1930 she was beginning to identify a new system of movement and new principles of choreography.

Critics and audiences soon became accustomed to Graham's innovative style of movement and she developed a following among serious dance patrons, scholars and critics.

Graham's movement system and her theory of contraction and release are central to the development of modern dance in the United States.

Graham was the first modern dance choreographer to fully use collaborations with other modern artists to create her dance theatre masterpieces. Her collaboration with Isamu Noguchi and Aaron Copland in "Appalachian Spring," for example, remains one of the dance's great masterpieces. 

Martha Graham produced some of the greatest masterpieces of the American modern dance. She danced and choreographed for over seventy years. Graham was the first dancer ever to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the USA: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.The Martha Graham Dance Company is still a vital force and can be seen in residence in New York City and on tour.