Ann Miller Tap Biography
December 23rd, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Movie Critic
Tap Dancer Ann Miller was born April 12, 1923 in Chireno, a small town in Texas. Her father, John Collier, a criminal attorney who defended some famous gangsters like Machine Gun Kelly and the Barrow Gang, wanted a son. She was born Johnnie Lucille Collier, but later became known as Annie.
In childhood, Annie had rickets, so she started tap dancing lessons to exercise her legs. At age nine, Annie’s parents divorced, and she moved to California with her mother where she took various jobs dancing to support them. At age thirteen, pretending to be eighteen, Annie was hired as a dancer at the “Black Cat Club” in San Francisco. While working there, she was discovered by Lucille Ball, and the rest is history.
She signed a contract with RKO at age fourteen, being cast in such films as “Stage Door” (1937), “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938), “Room Service” (1938) and “Too Many Girls” (1940). She moved from RKO to Columbia Pictures, then to MGM, making her most memorable film, “Easter Parade” (1948), with Fred Astaire.
The fifties, sixties, and seventies landed Ann Miller many theatre and television roles, and her Broadway hit in “Sugar Babies”, in 1979, put her on Broadway for eight years. At age 75, Ann starred in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”, and three years later she was in “Mullholland Falls.”
Ann Miller made over forty films as a dancer, and her legs were insured for $1,000,000. She was famous for her style of fast tapping with recorded movements of 500 taps per minute. She received numerous awards in her lifetime, including the Flo-Bert Award to Celebrate Tap Dance in 1994. Her tap shoes, which she called Moe and Joe, are now exhibited in the Smithsonian.
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