Ginger Rogers Wiki, Biography, Age, Spouse, Height, Net Worth, Fast Facts

Rogers was born in Independence, Missouri, and raised in Kansas City. She and her family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, when she was nine years old. She won a 1925 Charleston dance contest^[1] which launched a successful vaudeville career. After that, she gained recognition as a Broadway actress for her stage debut in Girl Crazy. This led to a contract with Paramount Pictures, which ended after five films. Rogers had her first successful film roles as a supporting actress in 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).

In the 1930s, Rogers’s nine films with Fred Astaire are credited with revolutionizing the genre and gave RKO Pictures some of its biggest successes: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). But after two commercial failures with Astaire, she turned her focus to dramatic and comedy films. Her acting was well received by critics and audiences in films such as Stage Door (1937), Vivacious Lady (1938), Bachelor Mother (1939), The Major and the Minor (1942) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). After winning the Oscar, Rogers became one of the biggest box-office draws and highest paid actresses of the 1940s.^[1]

Rogers’s popularity was peaking by the end of the decade. She reunited with Astaire in 1949 in the commercially successful The Barkleys of Broadway. She starred in the successful comedy Monkey Business (1952) and was critically lauded for her performance in Tight Spot (1955) before entering an unsuccessful period of filmmaking in the mid-1950s, and returned to Broadway in 1965, playing the lead role in Hello, Dolly! More Broadway roles followed, along with her stage directorial debut in 1985 of an off-Broadway production of Babes in Arms. She continued to act, making television appearances until 1987 and wrote an autobiography Ginger: My Story which was published in 1991. In 1992, Rogers was recognized at the Kennedy Center Honors. She died of natural causes in 1995, at age 83.

During her long career, Rogers made 73 films and she ranks number 14 on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars list of female stars of classic American cinema.

Ginger Rogers Wiki, Biography

Virginia Katherine McMath was born on July 16, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, the only child of Lela Emogene Owens, a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer, and William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer.^{[2]: 9, 10 [2]: 16 [3]} Her maternal grandparents were Wilma Saphrona (née Ball) and Walter Winfield Owens.^[4]: 3 She was of Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestry.^[5] Her mother gave birth to Ginger at home, having lost a previous child in a hospital.^[2]: 11 Her parents separated shortly after she was born.^{[2]: 1, 2, 11}After unsuccessfully trying to reunite with his family, McMath kidnapped his daughter twice, and her mother divorced him soon thereafter.^{[2]: 7, 15 [6]} Rogers said that she never saw her natural father again.^[2]: 15

In 1915, Rogers moved in with her grandparents, who lived in nearby Kansas City, while her mother made a trip to Hollywood in an effort to get an essay she had written made into a film.^[2]: 19 Lela succeeded and continued to write scripts for Fox Studios.^{[2]: 26–29}

One of Rogers’s young cousins, Helen, had a hard time pronouncing “Virginia”, shortening it to “Badinda”; the nickname soon became “Ginga”.^[7]

When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the surname Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record. She attended, but did not graduate from, Fort Worth’s Central High School (later renamed R. L. Paschal High School.)

As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a school teacher, but with her mother’s interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.

Personal life

Rogers, an only child, maintained a close relationship with her mother, Lela Rogers, throughout her life. Lela, a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer, was one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, was a founder of the successful “Hollywood Playhouse” for aspiring actors and actresses on the RKO set, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.^[21] Rogers was a lifelong member of the Republican Party, who campaigned for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 presidential election, Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and Ronald Reagan in the 1966 California gubernatorial election.^[22][23][24] She was a strong opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking out against both him and his New Deal proposals. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Rogers and her mother had a very close professional relationship. Lela Rogers was credited with pivotal contributions to her daughter’s early successes in New York City and in Hollywood, and gave her much assistance in contract negotiations with RKO. She also wrote a children’s mystery book with her daughter as the central character.^[25]

On March 29, 1929, Rogers married for the first time at age 17 to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper). They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. Rogers dated Mervyn LeRoy in 1932, but they ended the relationship and remained friends until his death in 1987. In 1934, she married actor Lew Ayres (1908–96). They divorced seven years later.

In 1943, Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, who was a U.S. Marine. Upon his return from World War II, Briggs showed no interest in continuing his incipient Hollywood career. They divorced in 1949. In 1953, she married Jacques Bergerac, a French actor 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1969, after his bouts with alcohol and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in Jamaica.

Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses Lucille Ball and Bette Davis. She appeared with Ball in an episode of Here’s Lucy on November 22, 1971, in which Rogers danced the Charleston for the first time in many years. Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman, Wanda Tuchock’s Finishing School (1934). Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser, wife of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, but was not Rita Hayworth’s natural cousin, as has been reported.^{[citation needed]} Hayworth’s maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers’s maternal aunt, Jean Owens.

She was a talented tennis player, and entered the 1950 US Open. However, she and Frank Shields were knocked out of the mixed doubles competition in the first round.^[26]

She was raised a Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent. She devoted a great deal of time in her autobiography to the importance of her faith throughout her career.^[27] Rogers’s mother died in 1977. Rogers remained at the 4-Rs (Rogers’ Rogue River Ranch) until 1990, when she sold the property and moved to nearby Medford, Oregon.

The City of Independence, Missouri, designated the birthplace of Ginger Rogers a Historic Landmark Property in 1994. On July 16, 1994, Ginger and her secretary, Roberta Olden, visited Independence, Missouri to appear at the Ginger Rogers’ Day celebration presented by the city. Ginger was present when Mayor Ron Stewart affixed a Historic Landmark Property plaque to the front of the house where she was born on July 16, 1911. She signed over 2,000 autographs at this event, which was one of her last public appearances.

The home was purchased in 2016 by Three Trails Cottages and restored, then transformed into a museum dedicated to Lela Owens-Rogers and Ginger Rogers. It contains memorabilia, magazines, movie posters, and many items from Ginger’s ranch that Lela and Ginger owned. Several gowns that Ginger Rogers wore are on display. The museum was open seasonally from April to September, and several special events were held at the site each year. It closed in August 2019.^[28]

Ginger Rogers made her last public appearance on March 18, 1995, when she received the Women’s International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.

Rogers spent winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford, Oregon. She died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25, 1995, from natural causes at the age of 83.^[1][29][30] She was cremated and her ashes interred with her mother Lela Emogene in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.^[31]

• Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the “Cheek to Cheek” dance in Top Hat, are in the “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” section of The Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968).
• Rogers’s image is one of many famous women’s images of the 1930s and 1940s featured on the bedroom wall in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings pasted on the wall created by Anne and her sister Margot while hiding from the Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass.
• Ginger The Musical by Robert Kennedy and Paul Becker which Ginger Rogers approved and was to direct on Broadway the year of her death was in negotiations as late as the 2016–17 Broadway season. Marshall Mason directed its first production in 2001 starring Donna McKechnie and Nili Bassman and was choreographed by Randy Skinner.
• Rogers was the heroine of a novel, Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), in which “the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress, but has no connection … it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person.” It is part of a series known as “Whitman Authorized Editions”, 16 books published between 1941 and 1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.^[32]
• The Dancing House in Prague (Czech: Tančící dům), sometimes known as Ginger and Fred, was designed by American architect Frank Gehry and inspired by the dancing of Astaire and Rogers.
• In the 1981 film Pennies From Heaven, Bernadette Peters’s character dances with Steve Martin’s as they watch Fred and Ginger’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” sequence from 1936’s Follow the Fleet, using it as their inspiration.
• Federico Fellini’s film Ginger and Fred centers on two aging Italian impersonators of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Rogers sued the production and the distributor when the film was released in the U.S. for misappropriation and infringement of her public personality. Her claims were dismissed, as according to the judgment, the film only obliquely related to Astaire and her.^[33]
• Rogers was among the sixteen Golden Age Hollywood stars referenced in the bridge of Madonna’s 1990 single “Vogue”.^[34]
• Rogers is the namesake of the Ginger Rogers, a cocktail containing gin, ginger, and mint.^[35][36][37]
• Rogers was the subject of a quotation summarizing women’s capacity to achieve that is popular among feminists: “Rogers did everything [Astaire] did, backwards . . . and in high heels.” The quote comes from a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip by Bob Thaves.^[38]
• A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007.

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Net Worth

The Estimated Net worth is $80K – USD $85k.