1899–1987 · American dancer, singer, actor and choreographer
Born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, Astaire spent his childhood and youth in vaudeville and then on Broadway and the London stage with his sister Adele, before a solo film career that made him, by common consent, the greatest popular dancer ever filmed. He is the subject of this line, not its author — and he told the story against himself for decades, keeping the report as a memento and correcting the wording when asked. He insisted on his own innovations too: dances shot in long takes with the dancers in full view, and numbers written into the plot rather than staged as spectacle.