Ann Miller’s screen presence was a dazzling combination of precision, speed and sheer joie de vivre. Few performers of Hollywood’s Golden Age radiated such energy. This vivid description from My Favourite Westerns perfectly captures her persona.
They don’t make ’em like this any more. They don’t know how. Ann Miller could crowd a rhino out of a playpen – and had the kicks to back it. She was brazen … she was blazing … she was brilliant. And she knew it. She was a blistering bar top dancer … who loved what she was doing. And so did we.
She built her career on her extraordinary machine-gun tap dancing, becoming a worthy successor to Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers. Studio publicity claimed she could knock out 500 taps a minute – and watching her on screen, you almost believe it.
Getting those taps on screen was no mean achievement. It began in the rehearsal halls with tap shoes as the performers worked on their numbers. But by the time the cameras rolled, the dancers had to switch to rubber soles to protect the highly glossed floors. Only later, in the sound studio, would they don earphones, watch the playback and tap their rhythms onto wooden boards to create the final soundtrack.
Ann managed to combine an eventful personal life with this fierce professionalism and a career in show business that spanned an astonishing 67 years, from her first, uncredited, appearance on screen in 1934 to her swan song in 2001. Her final appearance was in David Lynch’s extraordinary movie Mulholland Drive, in which she’s cast as Coco Lenoix, the eccentric manager of a Hollywood apartment complex. Let David Lynch have the final word for now:
It’s like Ann Miller was my aunt. She lived in the present but carried this beautiful past. She was 100% hip, and we got along like Ike and Mike from the get-go.
Ann Miller dancing queen
These photos span much of Ann Miller’s career on the big screen. The first, a publicity shot for Paramount, dates from 1942; the last from 1954, when her contract with MGM was drawing to a close.
Ann Miller grows up
Like so many stars growing up during the Great Depression, Ann Miller has a tough childhood. She’s born in Houston, Texas in 1923, the only child of Clara Emma and John Alfred Collier, a criminal lawyer whose clients include “Baby Face” Nelson, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the original Bonnie and Clyde. Ann describes him as “an Irish playboy at heart.”
As she gets older, it begins to dawn on her that her parents are not getting along, her mother is often in tears and her father is seeing other women. One day, she returns home with her mother to find her father and “his lady of the day nude in bed in the middle of their passionate love making.” Her mother packs their bags, moves to Hollywood with her daughter and files for divorce.
Ann is just ten years old and things are pretty desperate. They’re living in a “tiny one-room kitchenette apartment in Hollywood with a sofa that converted into two beds. We each had our own little pull-out bed, so narrow that I used to roll off mine all the time.”
Because Ann’s mother is almost stone deaf, she can’t get any work. The most viable option seems to be to find a dancing job for Ann.
When I was a little girl I had rickets and my mother gave me ballet lessons to straighten my legs. Or at least that was her excuse. My legs were not all that skinny – just a little knock-kneed according to my outspoken Texas mother. And she insisted that I have perfectly straight legs. That’s how it all started.
Ann Miller in 1941
These photos were all taken in or around 1941. Two are publicity shots for Columbia Pictures, with whom Ann made Time out of Rhythm that year. The others are publicity shots for Paramount Pictures, who released Go West, Young Lady that year. They are probably by A L Whitey Schafer, who moved to head up Paramount’s stills photography department in 1941. These prints from Ann Miller’s estate.
But it was a meeting with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson that inspired Ann’s love of dancing:
Mr. “Bojangles” came to Houston once for an engagement at the Majestic Theatre, and my mother took me to see him. Something in the way he danced turned me on. After the show, my mother took me backstage to meet him and she insisted, much to my embarrassment, that I do a little dance for him. She wanted him to tell her if I was doing my steps properly. Poor Mother… I’ll never forget how nice and kind and patient Bill Robinson was with us. He watched my little ballet number. Then he did a few taps for me and asked me to try to tap along with him. He sang “Bye, Bye, Blues” and clapped out the rhythm with his hands, and there I was doing my first tap dance with Mr. “Bojangles” in his dressing room. I took to tap dancing like a duck to water.
On the advice of their landlady, Ann and her mother visit a little tap shoe shop a few blocks from their apartment, almost opposite the dancing studio where she took lessons the previous summer when her mother was still receiving money from her husband. Mr Morgan, the proprietor, is so impressed by the dance Ann does for him that he gives her a pair of shoes and tells her she can rehearse in his shop on a special tap board.
Her first job is doing lunchtime dance routines at local clubs. She’s only 12 years old but tall for her age and just about able to pass as 18! It is her pianist who persuades her to adopt the stage name Ann Miller on the basis that Lucille Collier, her birth name, is just not memorable.
She goes on to win an amateur contest at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, which leads to a two-week engagement there. She’s spotted by a talent scout who books her into the Casanova Club on Sunset Strip, which in turn leads to her first big dancing job – at the Bal Tabarin, another San Francisco club. Among the audience one night are Lucille Ball and RKO talent scout Benny Rubin, “a man I didn’t know then but who was to change the course of my life.”
He’s impressed but there’s a problem – the studio will consider only those who have reached the age of 18. Employing an under-18 would mean paying for a teacher on the set and not even getting a full eight-hour day. The challenge for Ann and her mother is to get a forged birth certificate. And where better to get it than from Ann’s father, who duly obliges.
Ann Miller on the silver screen
At RKO, Ann’s first significant role is as Ginger Rogers’ dancing partner in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937). Ginger and Hermes Pan, the film’s choreographer, will become two of her best friends. The latter will also become her dance director. But her real break is a starring role in Radio City Revels (1938). She’s a big hit, RKO raise her salary from $150 to $250 a week and she gets noticed by influential gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who reveals to her readers:
BREAK FOR MILLER…
Little Ann Miller, who scored such a hit in Radio City Revels, wins out over dozens of candidates for the role of the dance-daffy ballet-minded daughter in You Can’t Take It With You. It is going to seem funny to see Ann, who is such a good dancer, playing a girl who can hardly get her feet out of her own way, but it’s a splendid opportunity since this is one of the best comedy roles of the play. The Columbia deal to borrow Ann from RKO for their high priced comedy went through today.
Frank Capra’s romantic comedy wins two Oscars: Best Director and Best Picture. The same year she also appears alongside Lucille Ball and the Marx Brothers in Room Service. In her autobiography, Ann reflects:
Adding it all up, that year 1938 seems filled with firsts – my first kiss, my first date, my first Oscar show, my first and only movie that was to win an Oscar, my first p.a. [personal appearance] tour, and that first sight of my name up there in lights.
Notes on the photos
This is the first of three sets of four publicity images, all of which were issued by MGM. None are dated, all have MGM code numbers. The images are arranged in ascending code-number order.
And 1938 does indeed turn out to be a high point in her Hollywood career. Over the following eight years, she appears in a series of forgettable movies, mostly musicals, for RKO, Republic and Columbia, for whom she signs in 1941. Ann herself acknowledges that “All my pictures for Columbia, I am the first to admit, were only B pictures. That’s why I was known as Queen of the Bees.” Her career at Columbia effectively ends with her engagement and, three months’ later, marriage, to Reese Milner (more of which later).
After a couple of years out, she moves to MGM, where she succeeds Eleanor Powell as the studio’s new “dancing queen.” Her first movie is the much-loved Easter Parade (1948) alongside Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. Other highlights of this golden period for her are On The Town (1949), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), and Hit the Deck (1955). Her final film for MGM is The Great American Pastime (1956), and that pretty much concludes her career on the silver screen.
I loved working at MGM. Here I was actually eating lunch in the same commissary with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. I even saw Greta Garbo there once, when she came to visit George Cukor… My so-called reign spanned approximately a 10-year period, from 1948 to 1958, when I married my second husband. But those in-between years were the happiest of my life.
![[HQ] I've Gotta Hear That Beat (Small Town Girl-1953)](https://www.aenigma-images.com/wp-content/uploads/cache/2025/06/dHYL9bNxaIU-1/754244521.jpg "[HQ] I've Gotta Hear That Beat (Small Town Girl-1953)")
Notes on the video clips
- Easter Parade (1948). Ann Miller’s show-stopping performance of Shakin’ The Blues Away is all the more remarkable given that she performed it in a brace. Her back was still in traction from falling down a staircase at the hands of her husband, Reese Milner.
- On The Town (1949). Ann Miller is a lascivious anthropology student fantasising about what prehistoric man might have been like. Other members of the chorus are Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Betty Garrett.
- Small Town Girl (1953). The first minute of I’ve Got To Hear That Beat is pretty standard stuff. Then the number turns surreal as dance director Busby Berkeley surrounds Ann Miller with the hands and instruments of the musicians – their heads and bodies hidden under the floor!
- Kiss Me Kate (1953). In Too Darn Hot Ann Miller combines virtuoso tap dancing with immaculately cheeky delivery of the lyrics as she prances sexily around her astonished audience. This is her at the peak of her career on the silver screen.
Ann Miller and the Hollywood moguls
In the 1940s and ’50s Ann Miller comes face-to-face with two of Hollywood’s biggest moguls: Harry Cohn and Louis B Mayer. She talks about both in her autobiography:
I must say that Harry Cohn was a rather awesome sight to behold. Or at least this was my first impression of him when Vic Orsatti [Ann’s agent] took me in to sign my contract. There he was sitting behind his big desk. He looked like a large grizzly bear. And when he stood and shook hands with me, I thought he was going to break my arm, he was so big.
He was very tall, with broad shoulders, and a roar like a bear. He was a rough, tough, and gruff man and he ran his studio with an iron hand. But he had a kind, decent side to him. He was always very polite and kind to my mother and me. I’m sure he had girls, all kinds of them. But he never played the wolf-role with me and I never had any run-ins with him – until later when he wanted to sell my contract to Louis B. Mayer. …
Harry Cohn was known as one of the most hated men in Hollywood. He kept a riding crop on his desk which he was apt to pick up and crack at anyone who got out of line. But I always felt that his bark was much worse than his bite.
That may be so, but Cohn was less polite and generous about impressionable Ann in her absence, as choreographer Jack Cole remembers:
As a matter of fact, one time Ann Miller asked me about something and I said, “Darling, let’s don’t talk about this script, it’s a piece of shit.” So the next day Harry Cohn called me in and said, “I’m going to tell you one more time, keep your big mouth shut.” When I asked what was the matter, he said, “Ann Miller is at home and won’t come to work because you said the script is a piece of shit.” I said, “Well, I did and it is.” He said, “I know that. What the fuck does it matter to her? She’s just a dumb broad with large thighs and I’m paying her so much money, so what’s she give a damn whether it’s a piece of shit or not? I want her to do it. You go to the phone and you get her back here.”
Ann is more effusive about Louis B Mayer:
I had heard terrible things about Louis B. Mayer. He was known as the mean old Czar of Hollywood. I never saw that side of Louis B. Mayer. And I’m glad I didn’t. I knew him only as a very kind man with a soft heart, a man who loved beauty and goodness, a man who respected respectability. …
It was a big thrill for me to be courted by a man of such eminence as Louis B. Mayer. He was not a handsome man but he was brilliant and he had compassion and he was kind. He was virile and strong, with a big neck, broad shoulders, and the muscular build of a man half his age. His personality was so strong that it took over the room. He didn’t need to be tall or beautiful of face. He walked with a lofty and regal air. He had great personal magnetism and charm.
He was a superb dancer. He had feet of gold and he loved to fly around the dance floor. And what’s more, he never stepped on my feet. … I found him physically attractive because of his masculine vitality combined with his gentleness of manner. I suppose he wasn’t always so gentle in business affairs.
But when he asks Ann to marry him, she finds herself pushed one way and then the other:
I remember my agent, Vic Orsatti, arguing with my mother, “Mrs, Miller, think of the advantages. This man owns the town. He’s the Czar of Hollywood.” And my mother would say, “So you want Annie to be the Czarina? Heavens no, he’s much too old for her.” Vic would say, “It’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.’ How truly prophetic.
Now, about Harry Cohn plotting to sell her contract to Louis B Mayer… Cohn always has an eye to the main chance. So when he hears of his studio rival’s infatuation with Ann, he pounces. He casts her in an expensive movie, knowing that this will boost the asking price of her contract. But it all comes to nothing. Shortly afterwards, she meets Reese Milner, he asks her to marry him and she says yes.
The reactions of the two studio bosses are utterly in character. Cohn is furious that his star is about to quit, throws and strop and gives her chapter and verse on her fiancé’s womanising. When he hears about her engagement, Louis B Mayer swallows a whole bottle of sleeping pills and has to be rushed to hospital.
Ann Miller’s and the men in her life
Ann Miller marries three times and the result is the same every time: disaster. In a 2004 article for the Observer, Rex Reed reports that she confided in him once:
I have worked like a dog all my life and, honey, I am here to tell you that dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and slave and, in my case, you sprain, twist and break every bone in your body, and the audience doesn’t think you’ve got a brain in your head. So every time a good-looking millionaire came along chasing me with cars and chinchillas, I married him because he always promised I’d never have to dance again.
Her first husband, Reese Milner, is the heir to Consolidated Steel. He asks her to marry him three months after they first meet. She confronts him with Cohn’s allegations:
Then suddenly – I’ll never forget it – Reese turned on me like a raving maniac, shouting, “It’s all because of that fat old Jew, Louis B. Mayer. He’s behind all this. How can you be in love with a man like that?”
In spite of which, she goes right ahead and ties the knot in February 1946.
We hadn’t been married even two weeks when I began to see that Reese Milner’s personality would change radically when he was drinking. I was horrified, heartsick, frightened – and trapped. I was afraid to tell my mother that my life was in danger. I hadn’t even told her that I was pregnant. All I could do was pray that everything would be all right, that perhaps our baby would help Reese stay in control of himself.
Her prayer is in vain. Reese’s violent, abusive behaviour builds and builds until:
The end, in fact, came when I was nine months pregnant. We were spending a few days at Rancho La Vista, Reese’s ranch near Ojai. Reese and I had a row and I don’t remember clearly all the details of the fight but I do remember slipping and falling, falling, falling down a long flight of stairs, landing on my back and screaming in pain.
In her TCM interview with Robert Osborne, she says Reese threw her down the stairs and she broke her back. Anyway, Ann is rushed to hospital, where she gives birth to a baby girl, who dies three hours later. Her doctors tell her she will never dance again, nor will she be able to have another baby. The couple divorce early in 1947.
Eleven years later, thwarted in her love for Bill O’Connor, an attorney whose Catholicism precludes divorce from his wife, Ann gives marriage another go. This time her husband is Bill Moss, a Texas oil man. Once again she gives up her career and once again she finds herself married to a man with a serious drink problem. They separate in February 1961 and she files for divorce, testifying that he has often struck her and once broke her hand.
The same year she gets hitched to Arthur Cameron, another multimillionaire oilman with a weakness for alcohol. It proves to be another tempestuous affair, ending in divorce the following year. In fact the annulment of Ann’s marriage to Cameron is granted just a day before her final divorce from her previous husband. According to the Los Angeles Times (11 May 1962):
When reminded by newsmen her final divorce from Texas oilman William Moss would not be final in California courts until today, Miss Miller said: “Heavens, does that mean I’m still married to him?”
In her autobiography, she observes that:
All my husbands were handsome, rich and utterly charming when they were sober. They were all basically playboys and quite spoiled. All my husbands wanted to be married bachelors, and I was too dumb to catch on.
Her words, not mine, and surely echoes of her father here. Of course, they are not the only men with whom she’s romantically linked. The list is long. It includes Prince Rainier (before he marries Grace Kelly), Aly Kahn (before he marries Rita Hayworth) and Aristotle Onassis (before he marries Jacqueline Kennedy). Also Conrad Hilton (hotelier), André Dubonnet (drinks magnate), Jack Seabrook (owner of Birds Eye), Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) and a couple of maharajahs. And then there are her obstetrician (possibly but probably not Dr Irving Ress) and Mario Cabre (Ava Gardner’s co-star and admirer).
Ann Miller on stage
Perhaps unexpectedly in the light of her success in You Can’t Take It With You, Ann finds herself banished from Hollywood to Broadway in 1939. In her autobiography, she says that this is the result of a conflict of interest on the part of her agency. As well as Ann, they represent MGM’s star dancer, Eleanor Powell, and MGM are none too keen on the publicity Ann is generating at RKO. Eleanor’s contract is worth much more to the agency than Ann’s, so putting her onto the stage provides a convenient let-out.
Ann Miller by Murray Korman
Murray Korman took up photography in 1926 and achieved success almost overnight. During that time he set up two studios in New York City. In one hs photographed debutantes and socialites, in the other aspiring entertainers. He must have taken these three shots of Ann Miller during her year on Broadway in 1939. These prints from Ann Miller’s estate.
George White’s Scandals is a long-running series of Broadway revues inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies. By 1939 the show is running out of steam, so appearing in it is not without risk from a career perspective. In spite of her misgivings, it proves to be something of a triumph for Ann. The New York Daily Mirror tells its readers, “Ann is terrific. She’s an eye tonic, has loads of style and a personality that whirls with hurricane force across the footlights.” And Life magazine does a photo series of her dance with the caption, “A hit in George White’s Scandals is Ann Miller, who, with no apparent muscles in her legs, does a slinky version of the Mexiconga.”
Then it’s back to Hollywood, to which she devotes the next 15 or so years, apart from a brief hiatus for her first marriage. By the mid-1950s, the parts are starting to dry up and it’s time to seek pastures new. So she turns her attention to television and the stage, where she performs in a series of shows, musicals and ads (including the celebrated Great American Soup Commercial) over the course of more than four decades.
The highlight is her triumphant return to Broadway in 1969 in the title role of the long-running musical, Mame. Specially written and choreographed for her performance is a spectacular tap-dance, which wins her bountiful accolades. Ten years later, she stars again on Broadway, this time with Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies, a glitzy tribute to the era of burlesque. In a CBS News obituary, she’s quoted as saying:
At MGM, I always played the second feminine lead. I was never the star in films. I was the brassy, good-hearted showgirl. I never really had my big moment on the screen. Broadway gave me the stardom that my soul kind of yearned for.
And fade she does not. As the years go by, her look becomes instantly recognisable: big, black, bouffant hair, “war paint” (her term) makeup and costumes that emphasise her legs. Yep, she’s brassy, she’s sassy, she’s glamorous, she’s funny and above all she’s irrepressible. In her mid-60s, there she is singing I’m Still Here in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. And all the while she’s coining it.
Notes on the video clips
These four video clips together make up an episode of TCM’s Private Screenings with Robert Osborne. In it he interviews Ann Miller. The session was recorded and broadcast in 1997.
Ann Miller’s legs and the invention of pantyhose
Like Betty Grable, one of Ann Miller’s greatest assets are her legs. Like Betty Grable’s, Ann’s legs are insured for a million dollars – with Lloyd’s of London, of course. In her autobiography, Ann modestly points out that this is not for their looks but to protect RKO from losing a fortune should she break a leg halfway through making one of their movies, forcing them to reshoot all the scenes she’s completed.
Because they’re so long, Ann’s legs also pose a challenge for the costume department. The studios expect her to wear sheer silk stockings. This means having them made to measure and then sewing her into them:
How well I remember the misery I went through standing for hours and hours on end all those years with two wardrobe ladies sewing my silk stockings into the underneath elastic seams of my tight panty briefs. I couldn’t wear garter supporters in the underpants because my costumes were always so tight that the garters would make lumps. So in every picture I made the stockings had to be sewn onto the pants, and I had to stand while it was being done. The stockings always had seams down the back and I had to stand straight and tall in order to get the seams straight.
Ann claims that her travails led Willy de Mond to invent pantyhose. Willy is a Hollywood institution. His clientele includes studios, stars and socialites. According to Norma Lee Browning, he’s a big fan of Ann’s and she introduces many of his firsts: mesh stockings in 1940, seamless opera hose in 1947 and later elaborate sequinned and embroidered stockings.
Want to know more about Ann Miller?
The main source for this piece, from which most of the quotations were drawn, is Miller’s High Life by Ann Miller with Norma Lee Browning. There’s also Peter Shelley’s biography, Ann Miller: Her Life and Career.
Online, as always there’s Wikipedia and IMDb, the latter particularly valuable for the actress’s filmography. Quite a long interview with Ann Miller has been republished on Playbill.
And then there are obituaries in, among other publications, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post and The Independent (via Google).
