I dug up my dad’s old Fred Astaire tapes, and now I find him super-inspiring. He’s, like, one of the best dancers.
Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor – those were my idols. All I ever wanted to be was a motion picture song-and-dance man. I kind of fell into other things. Did walk-ons and bits for years and worked in little theater at night.
You hear younger women say, ‘I don’t believe I’m a feminist. I believe women should have equal right and I believe in fighting for the rights of other women, but I’m certainly not a feminist. No, no, not that!’ It’s just a word. If you called it ‘Fred’ would it be better?
I loved old black and white movies, especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them – the songs, the music, the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world.
The entire island knows our father, Fred Hemmings, Jr. – kids, adults, surfers, the governor, grocery clerks, gang members who call our house at night and threaten to kill us as soon as they get out of jail. Fred was a world-champion surfer and is now a well-known, controversial politician.
Fred Armisen does a pretty good me.
Fred Hoyle was one of the first scientists to become famous on television and radio. It was because he told a dramatic story about the universe – about how amazing it is and the extraordinary discoveries that astronomers like him were making.
When I was a kid, I loved Nicholas brothers films. It was like skateboarding. Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding.
Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there’s the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in.
I’ve always been inspired by the great actors and actresses of the ’30s and ’40s like Fred Astaire, Ann Miller and Gene Kelly.
The only thing that frightens me a little is when I’m called Kevin rather than Fred, but that’s how people have known me for so many years. So, I can’t really blame them.
Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it’s possible to be an artist and a good person.
What Fred Lebow went through was an inspiration for me. You have to set goals for yourself.
Eventually I returned to the W to play in Dallas, because of my coach Fred Williams. But once Fred got fired, I knew that my support there was gone. And that the only way I could stay in the league would be if I were living near my family on the West Coast.
I remember vividly seeing ‘Tarzan’ and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
I don’t expect to win every battle but I think Fred Pierce has enough respect for me that I can go fight my battles and win my share.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
I’m a big Fred Armisen fan.
Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire.
For all Trump’s criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.
I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger’s laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.
I make up cassettes all the time – to take on the road with me – a song from this album, a song from that album. That’s the way I listen to music; it’s like one of those K Tel things: it’s from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.
I’d love to work with the people who really got the film industry going again through the ’70s: Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi.
I lived for 15 years in Los Angeles, and I still can’t believe that the handsomest man in the world, Cary Grant, and the greatest performer in the world, Fred Astaire, and Johnny Carson, one after another – they were all in my home at different times. I celebrated my 50th birthday with them. Unforgettable.
I think with the ‘Fred’ videos online, I prefer doing it by myself. I mean it’s YouTube. You want to have all the creative control because that’s the only place in the world where you get that.
I was very much aiming to go into movies eventually, like a lot of ‘SNL’ people. But, soon after I arrived, all these really good actors started, like Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis and Andy Samberg, and I thought, ‘If I were casting a movie, I would put all of them in it over me.’
What I got, unconsciously, from admiring Fred Astaire was that he didn’t want what he was doing to look difficult. What was difficult, in my opinion, was making it look so genuine, so effortless. I equally have tried to remain unseen on the screen.
I think I was so grateful, in the years after Sleater-Kinney broke up or went on hiatus or whatever you want to call it, to find ‘Portlandia’ and co-create ‘Portlandia’ with Fred Armisen, which allows for levity, allows for the same kind of kinetic energy, but channeled through absurdity and surrealism.
Most men, even egotistic actors, always shy away from dancing with me. Other dancers report the same trouble. They probably figure that I would be mentally comparing them with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. So I go to parties and usually just sit – unless George Burns is there – and then I have a ball.
I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that’s literally 70 years.
Fred Rogers was a children’s-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television–adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other’s faces – that he joined the medium as a reformer.
My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.
My uncle, who was a little more flamboyant, always said the guy who dressed the best was Fred Astaire.
I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn’t any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.
Whether it’s Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire or ‘West Side Story,’ see it on the big screen. That’s the way we should appreciate it.
After marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as a young man, John Lewis went on to become a legendary leader for civil rights alongside other giants of the movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
When Fred Astaire danced, everything in this world was perfect.
I’ve always had an innate ability to dance, but I’m not as spiffy as those cinema legends like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
You can compare Fred and Barney Rubble with Gleason and Carney.
I was very laced with drugs myself, but Fred seemed to be even more so than me. That might have had something to do with it. That might have had something to do with nobody wanting to play my records, too, I don’t know.
I’m really into Noel Gallagher’s lad culture vibe. I used to wear Fred Perry polo shirts a lot. In fact, I went to an Oasis concert, which I believe was the band’s penultimate gig before they disbanded, and I would say about 80 per cent of the audience were wearing the same polo.
I was a mod when I was a kid. I’d be in Italian pencil-leg trousers with those bowling shoes you wear outside and a Fred Perry polo shirt with a V-neck sweater. It was like an Essex uniform – a very specific look.
I always feel the most validated and confident being around people that I find funny – having Fred Armisen laugh at a scene or Bill Hader or Seth Meyers give me a compliment.
I live in a wonderful world of make-believe. A world of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. A world of Winnie the Pooh and Edward Bear. Things like that. Wonderful things. Funny things.
The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation’s dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.
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