Customer Reviews
A poor account of the life of the great Gene Kelly. - By: J. Taylor, 19 Aug 2008 
This is a bad biography. It was alright I suppose until I read up to Easter Parade. During the pre-production of the film, Gene Kelly broke his ankle & then called Fred Astaire & urged him out of retirement to make this film. The biographer obviously made up a story of Astaire announcing his retirement at his wife's funeral a few years before 1948. Yet when I read Astaire's autobiography earlier this year, I distinctly remember reading Astaire saying that his wife diedin 1954 & I looked up other accounts that say that she diedin 1954. I had to put the biography down after that, I thought to myself "If you make a mistake like that, how much of the biography is false?" Also it doesn't go into much detail, there is only about a paragraph on the spectacular balletin "An Americanin Paris" & I thought that if I were writing a biography of Kelly I would go into out much more detail about it, for example I would find out what inspired Kelly & how he felt throughout choreographing it, it would get a bit more attention from it.
Disappointing summary of the life of Gene Kelly - By: , 14 Mar 2000 
I looked forward to reading this book. I had read-and reread- Clive Hirschhorn's 1974 biography, butI wanted to read something that tied Kelly's life up & perhaps presented a well argued & constructive criticism of his work after his death. However Yudkoff's work proved extremely disappointing. The part of the book that dealt with things after the end of Hirschhorn's book was very short-only a few pages . The rest of the book dealt with Kelly's life but without shedding any new light on it.
The most annoying part however was the beginning of each chapter. Here Yudkoff "imagined" inward dialogue that Kelly was supposedly having whilst listening to a tribute being paid to him by the AFI. This, to me, put itin the catagory of the new biog of Ronald Reagan where the author puts himself into the narrative when he plainly wasn't there. How could Yudkoff know what Kelly was thinking? He freely admits that Hirschhorn was the biographer able to speak to Kelly. Yudkoff wasn't. The over-riding impression I was left with -rightly or wrongly- was that Yudkoff didn't really like Kelly. There is no warmthin the book towards him. If you didn't have the filmatic evidence you would be left with the impression that Kelly was a so-so dancer,a middle rate actor- &in later life a coward because he used doubles when he was older & had already proved his couragein films such as The Pirate & The Three Muskateers.
