It took Ann Miller, who has died from lung cancer aged 82, 12 years and 25 films to establish herself as one of Hollywood's most exciting tap dancers. The moment came when, in Easter Parade (1948), the vivacious, raven-haired 27-year-old stopped the show with Shakin' The Blues Away, a dynamic solo on a bare stage, in which she spins like a tapping top.
And to think that Irving Berlin was initially opposed to casting her in the picture.
After slaving away in a series of low-budget, often dismal musicals for various studios, the Texas-born Miller's big break came at MGM. Although she was the natural successor to Eleanor Powell, Miller never actually starred in a major film.
She most often played the wise-cracking second lead, most typically in her best two films, On The Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953). "Always providing zing, pizzazz and fun in her roles, she was usually cast as a not particularly bright character, who had a healthy yearning for the opposite sex, especially if they were rich," a critic wrote.
Ann's philandering father had wanted a boy, so she was named Johnnie Lucille Ann Collier. But she dropped the boy's name when she and her mother left for California. From the age of nine she had to support her mother, who was deaf and unable to work. After taking tap-dancing lessons, Miller got jobs in various Hollywood clubs, while being tutored at home.
In 1937 RKO asked her to sign as a contract player, although they needed proof that she was 18. She managed to get hold of a fake birth certificate.
She debuted in New Faces Of 1937. In between the negligible musicals, enlivened by her dance routines, she appeared in two of the decade's major movies: Gregory La Cava's delightfully witty Stage Door (1937), in which she played Ginger Rogers's dancing partner, and Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You (1938), where she was the ballet-dancing daughter of a loony family.
She also supported the Marx Brothers in Room Service (1938), before spending almost a year on Broadway in George White's Scandals.
During the war, Miller shook her legs in mini-musicals designed to please the troops, with titles like Priorities On Parade (1942).
After a marriage that lasted only a year, she signed with MGM and got her chance to shine.
She had an elegant duo with Fred Astaire in It Only Happens When I Dance With You. In the plot, she decides to leave her dancing partner to go solo; when Astaire objects, she responds: "I'm not being selfish, I'm just thinking of me."
In On the Town, the classic Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen musical about three sailors on leave, Miller played an anthropologist who throws herself at Jules Munshin, comparing his face to a prehistoric man. "Oh, sailor, I love you for having that head," she says, before going into a gyrating dance around the Museum of Anthropology which ends with the collapse of a dinosaur skeleton.
In Kiss Me Kate she had four splendid numbers, beginning with Too Darn Hot, in which she is at her sexy, twirling best, dressed in a brief, red costume, kicking her legs at the camera and also cheekily delivering the comedic Always True To You Darling In My Fashion. The film, her favourite, was the peak of her screen career.
After two more failed marriages she left films in 1956, although she continued to entertain in nightclubs and on the stage. Miller, whose passion was archaeology and who believed she was psychic, became a favourite on the American talk-show circuit.
Ann Miller: born April 12th, 1921; died January 22nd, 2004