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Other authors named Donald:
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Author's popularity: 7
Vote:  
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: -1
Vote: | Doing those costume pictures was wonderful. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Going up the walls doing somersaults, that trick took a couple of days. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I can picture things, like a painter would, though I'm not good at painting, either. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I didn't smoke. I didn't smoke then, and I don't smoke now. We worked every day - that keeps you in pretty good shape. We could go for a long time in one take. You had to be in good shape with Gene Kelly. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I grew up in vaudeville. All the hoofers used to get together in a drugstore down the street from the theater, or what-have-you, and if they knew a new step they would teach it to you. I learned hoofing steps that way. But going into ballet didn't come until I made those pictures with Kelly. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I like it live. I think the numbers are live in the movie. If they replaced any, it would have been due to extreme set noise. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think you should make more movies, more musicals. I think the public deserves that. I think this country deserves to be able to get out and foster that talent. Give them an opportunity to become stars. I think the whole idea is wonderful. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I worked with Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn - one of the greatest comedians and actors that ever lived - and Jimmy Durante. You can't ask for better than that. And it was great format. We had three and a half weeks to work on a show. It was a family-style thing. We used to walk on when someone was doing a handstand, crazy; we'd break them up. And it was great because it was live. They couldn't cut out the mistakes. And that's what audiences love. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I'm basically a hoofer, a tap dancer. I was always very good from the waist down, moving with the feet... I became what's known as a total dancer, using the entire body in order to express what you want to express in tap dancing and line. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm not a good choreographer: I can't remember what I put down. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | It's so wonderful... if your whole day is rotten, once they start the music, it seems to melt away. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My brothers and my mother were all dancers, outside of whatever else they did, like acrobatics, high-wire, trapeze. I was born in a circus. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Pratfalls are always funny. A performer has to answer to himself. If you think something's funny, you've got to go out there and try. It's only by trial and error that you find out. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Remember, if you do the same act for 20, 30 years it gets a little boring unless you've got something else going for you... And the orchestra really kept you going. They'd laugh at all your jokes, even if they'd been hearing them for the last 30 years. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | That is the godawful thing about television today. Performers don't have any place to hit and miss. You're either in or you're out; you don't have a chance to become good at your craft. If you make three pictures in a row and they don't go over, you're out of the business. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | They put me in a harness, like a horse, to learn the back somersault. It was weird up there when I put on that harness for the first time. The courage came with practice. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | To me, the funniest thing that happened was when Gene was filming the main title song on the back lot out in the rain. When they started, he was singing, and he looked great-so happy. The rain was coming down just perfectly, so each droplet seemed to have its own beat. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | We used to work in two great black houses: Chicago's Regal Theater, and the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in New York. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Well, my legs are the same size; I'm still 5-foot-10 - that's with heels. I started dancing when I was 13 months old. The first dance I did was the Black Bottom, and I did the same routine for years in the acts. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | What they're doing now with disco is combining a lot of the old steps and movements, like we did in the '40s. They're going back to the Shuffle, the Lindy, rhumbas, a little bit of Afro-Cuban. It's marvelous. Unfortunately, my body won't move that way. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Whatever they laughed at the most, that's what we did on the screen. I had to do it in one day because I was doing the pratfalls on cement, and my body, knees, ankles, and toes started to hurt. We saw right then we had to get the number done in one day, and we did it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You see, as far as the man's personality goes, there's no one who can touch Fred Astaire. He's unique. But for the work he does, I would say Tommy can do it, Fosse can do it. |
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Biography
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Donald "Danny" O'Connor (August 28, 1925 - September 27, 2003) was a singer, dancer and actor who came to fame in a series of movies in which he co-starred with Francis, the talking mule. He is still best known for his performance in the movie musical Singin' in the Rain.
O'Connor was born into an Irish immigrant family of vaudeville entertainers. As a toddler, he and his sister were involved in a road accident, which resulted in her death. His father died of a heart attack only a few weeks later. Yet it was as a comedy actor and a song-and-dance man that he became famous. His boyish looks did not allow him to take a romantic lead, except when appearing with a bigger star such as Ethel Merman (in Call Me Madam) or Bing Crosby (with whom he appeared in his first film at the age of eleven). However, he did have a separate Hollywood career in the late 1930s, in which he played such incongruous roles as Beau Geste. During World War II, he was re-invented as a star of musical films.
When the heyday of the film musical was over, O'Connor returned to the stage, and had a short-lived television series during the late 1960s. After overcoming a drinking problem in the 1970s, he continued to make film and television appearances into the 1990s. O'Connor was still making public appearances well into 2003.
Among his last words, he is reported to have expressed thanks for the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement which he expected to win at some future date. He left behind his wife, Gloria, and four children.
Donald O'Connor is buried in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Filmography *Melody for Two (1937) (scenes deleted)
*It Can't Last Forever (1937)
*Men with Wings (1938)
*Sing You Sinners (1938)
*Sons of the Legion (1938)
*Tom Sawyer, Detective (1938)
*Boy Trouble (1939)
*Unmarried (1939)
*Million Dollar Legs (1939)
*Beau Geste (1939)
*Night Work (1939)
*Death of a Champion (1939)
*On Your Toes (1939)
*What's Cookin'? (1942)
*Private Buckaroo (1942)
*Give Out, Sisters (1942)
*Get Hep to Love (1942)
*When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1942)
*It Comes Up Love (1943)
*Mister Big (1943)
*Top Man (1943)
*Chip Off the Old Block (1944)
*Follow the Boys (1944)
*This Is the Life (1944)
*The Merry Monahans (1944)
*Bowery to Broadway (1944)
*Patrick the Great (1945)
*Something in the Wind (1947)
*Are You with It? (1948)
*Feudin', Fussin', and A-Fightin' (1948)
*Screen Snapshots: Motion Picture Mothers, Inc. (1949) (short subject)
*Yes Sir That's My Baby (1949)
*Francis (1950)
*Curtain Call at Cactus Creek (1950)
*The Milkman (1950)
*Double Crossbones (1951)
*Francis Goes to the Races (1951)
*Singin' in the Rain (1952)
*Francis Goes to West Point (1952)
*I Love Melvin (1953)
*Call Me Madam (1953)
*Francis Covers the Big Town (1953)
*Walking My Baby Back Home (1953)
*Francis Joins the WACs (1954)
*There's No Business Like Show Business (1954)
*Francis in the Navy (1955)
*Anything Goes (1956)
*The Buster Keaton Story (1957)
*Cry for Happy(1961)
*The Wonders of Aladdin (1961)
*That Funny Feeling (1965)
*Just One More Time (1974) (short subject)
*That's Entertainment! (1974)
*Ragtime (1981)
*Pandemonium (1982)
*A Time to Remember (1987)
*Toys (1992)
*Father Frost (1996)
*Out to Sea (1997)
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Donald O'Connor".
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