Gwen Verdon

Gwyneth Evelyn Verdon was born in Culver City, California, on January 13, 1925. As a child she had serious leg problems and used corrective footwear or bracing, and she began dance study very young, training with the Los Angeles teacher Ernest Belcher. The reliable point is not that dance alone cured a medical condition but that early, sustained movement study built an unusual bodily intelligence in which placement, rhythm and characterization became inseparable. As a young performer in California she worked in film and formed a formative professional relationship with the choreographer Jack Cole, becoming his assistant, specialty dancer and dance coach and absorbing the detailed torso, hip, shoulder and hand isolations of his theatrical jazz.

By 1948 she was credited on Broadway as assistant choreographer for Magdalena, and in 1950 she appeared in Alive and Kicking. Her breakthrough came in 1953 as Claudine and Eve in Cole Porter's Can-Can, choreographed by Michael Kidd - not a Fosse production - where her Garden of Eden ballet became a sensation and earned the 1954 Tony Award for featured actress in a musical. In 1955 she originated Lola in Damn Yankees, beginning the sustained stage partnership for which she and the choreographer Bob Fosse became famous; the role brought her the 1956 Tony for leading actress, and she reprised it in the 1958 film, preserving Whatever Lola Wants and Who's Got the Pain on screen.

Verdon then achieved an extraordinary run of leading roles. She originated Anna in New Girl in Town in 1957 and shared the 1958 leading-actress Tony with her co-star Thelma Ritter, and in 1959 she won a fourth Tony for Redhead, directed and choreographed by Fosse with Donald McKayle credited as associate choreographer. She and Fosse married in 1960 and had a daughter, Nicole, in 1963; the marriage later became a separation without divorce, but the creative relationship endured. That collaboration is best understood as genuine partnership rather than the simplified muse-and-genius formula: Fosse held the credited directing and choreography roles, while Verdon was an indispensable interpreter, coach and, later, custodian of the work.

In 1966 she originated Charity Hope Valentine in Sweet Charity, directed and choreographed by Fosse from a Neil Simon book with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, joining optimism, bruised resilience and sophisticated dance phrasing in a role that earned another Tony nomination; Shirley MacLaine, not Verdon, played Charity in the 1969 film. Her final major original Broadway role was Roxie Hart, opposite Chita Rivera's Velma Kelly, in Chicago in 1975 - a part that extended her gift for making morally dubious behavior theatrically irresistible without erasing a character's loneliness. Her run in Chicago was interrupted in mid-1975 before she returned later that year.

After Chicago, Verdon increasingly brought her knowledge to consulting, teaching and character acting, serving as production supervisor for the touring Dancin', as assistant to Fosse on the 1986 revival of Sweet Charity, and as artistic adviser to the 1999 revue Fosse, which won the Tony for best musical. She also appeared in films including The Cotton Club, Cocoon, Alice and Marvin's Room. In 1992 she gave the Library of Congress the Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection, an archive of roughly 54,840 items, and in 1998 she received the National Medal of Arts, the United States government's highest arts honor. She died in Woodstock, Vermont, on October 18, 2000, of natural causes, aged 75, and Broadway marquees were dimmed in her honor.