Ginger Rogers (born Virginia Katherine McMath; July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer and singer who appeared in films, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century.
During her long career, she made 73 films, collaborating with Fred Astaire as a romantic lead actress and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She achieved great success on her own in a variety of film roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Kitty Foyle (1940). She ranks #14 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of actress screen legends.
Early life
Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in her mother's rented home at 100 Moore Street, Independence, Missouri.[1]:1, 2 She was the only living child of William "Eddins" McMath, a Scottish electrical engineer,[1]:9, 10 and his wife, Lela Emogene (née Owens; 1891–1977) who was of Welsh heritage.[1]:16[2]Her mother did not want her born in a hospital, having lost a previous child there.[1]:11 Her parents had separated before she was born,[1]:1, 2, 11 but her grandparents, Walter and Saphrona (née Ball) Owens, lived nearby in Kansas City.[1]:3 After unsuccessfully trying to become a family again, McMath kidnapped his daughter twice.[1]:7, 15 [3] Rogers said that she never saw her natural born father again.[1]:15 Her mother divorced her father, soon thereafter.
In 1915, Rogers moved in with her grandparents while her mother made a trip to Hollywood in an effort to get an essay she had written made into a film.[1]:19 Lela succeeded and continued to write scripts for Fox Studios.[1]:26–29 Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in Sherman Oaks, California so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).[citation needed]
One of Rogers' young cousins, Helen, had a hard time pronouncing "Virginia", shortening it to "Ginga"; the nickname stuck.
When "Ginga" was nine years old, her mother remarried, to John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the surname Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth, Texas. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record. She attended, but did not graduate from, Fort Worth's Central High School (later renamed R.L. Paschal High School).
As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a school teacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.[4]
Career
Vaudeville and Broadway
Rogers' entertainment career was born one night when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She then entered and won a Charleston dance contest which allowed her to tour for six months, at one point in 1926 performing at an 18-month-old theater called The Craterian in Medford, Oregon. This theater honored her many years later by changing its name to the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.
At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the nameJack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography, she knew Culpepper when she was a child, as her cousin's boyfriend). They formed a short-lived vaudeville double act known as "Ginger and Pepper". The marriage was over within months, and she went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called Top Speed, which opened on Christmas Day, 1929.
Within two weeks of opening in Top Speed, Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in Girl Crazy by George Gershwin andIra Gershwin, the musical play widely considered to have made stars of both her and Ethel Merman. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at the age of 19.
Early film roles
Rogers' first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929—Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, andCampus Sweethearts. In 1930, she was signed by Paramount Pictures to a seven-year contract.
Rogers soon got herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at Astoria Studios inAstoria, Queens—and moved with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé Exchange. She made feature films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox in 1932 and was named one of fifteen "WAMPAS Baby Stars". She then made a significant breakthrough as "Anytime Annie" in the Warner Brothers film 42nd Street (1933). She went on to make a series of films with Fox, Warner Bros. (Gold Diggers of 1933), Universal, Paramount, and RKO Radio Pictures.
1933–1939: Astaire and Rogers
Rogers was most famous for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO: Flying Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936),Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Carefree (1938), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) was produced later at MGM). They revolutionized the Hollywood musical, introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity, set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day.
Of the 33 partnered dances Rogers performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta (1935), "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time (1936). They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta (1935), "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat (1935) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936).Arlene Croce, Hannah Hyam and John Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally because of her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty, and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedienne, thus truly complementing Astaire, a peerless dancer who sometimes struggled as an actor and was not considered classically handsome. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences.
For special praise, they have singled out Rogers' performance in "Waltz in Swing Time" from Swing Time (1936), which is generally considered to be the most virtuosic partnered routine ever committed to film by Astaire. She normally had no solo dance routines at RKO (apart from the "I've Got a New Lease on Life" and "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" numbers from "In Person" (1935)). Astaire always included at least one virtuoso solo routine in each film, while Rogers performed the solo tap dance "Let Yourself Go" in the Astaire and Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936).
Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, both have acknowledged Rogers's input and have also testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked, "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No no, Ginger never cried".[5]
John Mueller summed up Rogers's abilities as follows: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners, not because she was superior to others as a dancer, but, because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began ... the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable".[citation needed]
According to Astaire, when they were first teamed together in Flying Down to Rio, "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."[6] Author Dick Richards, in his book "Ginger: Salute to a Star", quoted Astaire saying to Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art, "Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success."
After 15 months apart and with RKO facing bankruptcy, the studio paired Fred and Ginger for another movie called Carefree, but it lost money. Next came The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, but the serious plot and tragic ending resulted in the worst box office receipts of any of their films. This was driven not by diminished popularity, but by the hard 1930s economic reality. The production costs of musicals, always significantly more costly than regular features, continued to increase at a much faster rate than admissions.Rogers also introduced some celebrated numbers from the Great American Songbook, songs such as Harry Warren and Al Dubin's "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), "Music Makes Me" fromFlying Down to Rio (1933), "The Continental" from The Gay Divorcee (1934), Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936), the Gershwins'"Embraceable You" from Girl Crazy and "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" from Shall We Dance (1937). Furthermore, in song duets with Astaire, she co-introduced Berlin's "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936), Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" from Swing Time (1936) and the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from Shall We Dance (1937).
1933–1939: Rogers without Astaire
Both before and immediately after her dancing and acting partnership with Fred Astaire ended, Rogers starred in a number of successful dramas and comedies. Stage Door (1937) demonstrated her dramatic capacity, as the loquacious yet vulnerable girl next door, a tough minded, theatrical hopeful, opposite Katharine Hepburn. Successful comedies includedVivacious Lady (1938) with James Stewart, Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family, and Bachelor Mother (1939), with David Niven, in which she played a shop girl who is falsely thought to have abandoned her baby.
In 1934, Rogers sued Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation. Sylvia, Hollywood's fitness guru and radio personality, had claimed that Rogers was on Sylvia's radio show when, in fact, she was not.[7]
On March 5, 1939, Rogers starred in "Single Party Going East," an episode of Silver Theater on CBS radio.[8]
1940s
In the neo-realist Primrose Path (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she played a prostitute's daughter trying to avoid the fate of her mother. Further highlights of this period included Tom, Dick, and Harry, a 1941 comedy in which she dreams of marrying three different men; I'll Be Seeing You (1944), with Joseph Cotten; and Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: The Major and the Minor (1942), in which she played a woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse for an extended period. This film featured a performance by Rogers's own real mother, Lela, playing her film mother.In 1941, Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's Kitty Foyle. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. In Roxie Hart (1942), based on the same play which served as the template for the later musical Chicago, Rogers played a wisecracking wife on trial for a murder her husband committed.
Becoming a free agent, Rogers made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including Tender Comrade(1943), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945), and became the highest-paid performer inHollywood. However, by the end of the decade, her film career had peaked. Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire inThe Barkleys of Broadway in 1949, when Judy Garland was unable to appear in the role that was to have reunited her with her Easter Parade co-star.
Late career
Rogers's film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain, but she still scored with some solid movies. She starred in Storm Warning (1950) with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day, the noir, anti Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Brothers, and in Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks. In the same year, she also starred in We're Not Married!, also featuring Marilyn Monroe, and in Dreamboat. She played the female lead in Tight Spot (1955), a mystery thriller, with Edward G. Robinson. After a series of unremarkable films she scored a great popular success on Broadway in 1965, playing Dolly Levi in the long-running Hello, Dolly!.[9]
From the 1950s onwards, Rogers made occasional appearances on television, even substituting for a vacationing Hal March on The $64,000 Question. In the later years of her career, she made guest appearances in three different series byAaron Spelling: The Love Boat (1979), Glitter (1984), and Hotel (1987), which was her final screen appearance as an actress. In 1985, Rogers fulfilled a long-standing wish to direct when she directed the musical Babes in Arms off-Broadway in Tarrytown, New York, at 74 years old. That production starred Broadway talents Randy Skinner and Karen Ziemba.In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire: she presented him with a special Academy Award in 1950, and they were co-presenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967, during which they elicited a standing ovation when they came on stage in an impromptu dance. In 1969, she had the lead role in another long-running popular production, Mame, from the book by Jerome Lawrence andRobert Edwin Lee, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End of London, arriving for the role on the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York. Her docking there occasioned the maximum of pomp and ceremony at Southampton. She became the highest paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran for 14 months and featured a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth II.
The Kennedy Center honored Ginger Rogers in December 1992. This event, which was shown on television, was somewhat marred when Astaire's widow, Robyn Smith, who permitted clips of Astaire dancing with Rogers to be shown for free at the function itself, was unable to come to terms with CBS Television for broadcast rights to the clips (all previous rights holders having donated broadcast rights gratis).[10]
Personal life
Mother and daughter had an extremely close professional relationship, as well. Lela Rogers was credited with many pivotal contributions to her daughter's early successes in New York and in Hollywood and gave her much assistance in contract negotiations with RKO.Rogers was an only child, and she maintained a close relationship with her mother throughout her life. Lela Rogers (1891–1977) was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer. She was also one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps,[11] was a founder of the successful "Hollywood Playhouse" for aspiring actors and actresses on the RKO set, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
In her classic 1930s musicals with Astaire, Ginger Rogers, co-billed with him, was paid less than Fred, the creative force behind the dances, who also received 10% of the profits. But she was also paid less than many of the supporting "farceurs" billed beneath her, in spite of her much more central role in the films' great financial success. This was personally grating to her and had effects upon her relationships at RKO, especially with director Mark Sandrich, whose purported disrespect of Rogers prompted a sharp letter of reprimand from producer Pandro Berman, which she deemed important enough to publish in her autobiography. Rogers fought hard for her contract and salary rights and for better films and scripts.
Rogers' first marriage was at age 17 to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper) on March 29, 1929. They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. Ginger dated Mervyn LeRoy in 1932, but they ended the relationship and remained friends until his death in 1986. In 1934, she married actor Lew Ayres (1908–96). They divorced seven years later.
In 1943, Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, a U.S. Marine. Upon his return from World War II, Briggs showed no interest in continuing his incipient Hollywood career. They divorced in 1949. In 1953, she married Jacques Bergerac, a French actor 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1971, after his bouts with alcohol and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in Jamaica.
Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses Lucille Ball and Bette Davis. She appeared with Ball in an episode of Here's Lucyon November 22, 1971, in which Rogers danced the Charleston for the first time in many years. Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman, Wanda Tuchock's Finishing School (1934). Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser, but was not Rita Hayworth's natural cousin, as has been reported. Hayworth's maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers's maternal aunt, Jean Owens.
She was raised a Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent.[12] She devoted a great deal of time in her autobiography to the importance of her faith throughout her career. Rogers was a lifelong member of the Republican Party.
In 1977, Rogers's mother died. Rogers remained at the 4-Rs (Rogers's Rogue River Ranch) until 1990, when she sold the property and moved to nearby Medford, Oregon. Her last public appearance was on March 18, 1995, when she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.
Death
Rogers spent winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford, Oregon. She continued making public appearances (chiefly at award shows) until suffering a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and dependent on a wheelchair. Despite her stroke, Rogers never saw a doctor or went to a hospital. Rogers died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25, 1995, at the age of 83. An autopsy concluded that the cause of death was a heart attack.[13] She was cremated and her ashes interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California, with her mother's remains.[14]
Portrayals of Rogers
- Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the Cheek to Cheek dance in Top Hat, are in the "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" section of The Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968).
- Rogers's image is one of many famous women's images of the 1930s and 40s featured on the bedroom wall in theAnne Frank House in Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings pasted on the wall created by Anne and her sister Margot while hiding from the Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass.
- A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007.[15][16]
- Rogers was the heroine of a novel, Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), in which "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941–1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.[17]
- The Dancing House in Prague (Czech: Tancici dum), sometimes known as Ginger and Fred, was designed by American architect Frank Gehry and inspired by the dancing of Astaire and Rogers.
- In the 1981 film Pennies From Heaven, Bernadette Peters dances with Steve Martin in a scene which uses Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" sequence (from 1936's Follow the Fleet) as its inspiration.
- Federico Fellini's film Ginger and Fred is centered around two aging Italian impersonators of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Rogers sued the production and the distributor when the film was released in the U.S. for misappropriation and infringement of her public personality. Her claims were dismissed, as, according to the judgement, the film only obliquely related to Astaire and her.
Filmography
Features
| Title | Date | Director | Co-Starring | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Young Man of Manhattan | 1930 | Monta Bell | Claudette Colbert, Norman Foster | The line, "Cigarette me, big boy" became a popular catchphrase during the 1930s after audiences heard Ginger Rogers repeat it throughout the movie. |
| Queen High | 1930 | Fred Newmeyer | ||
| The Sap from Syracuse | 1930 | A. Edward Sutherland | Jack Oakie | |
| Follow the Leader | 1930 | Norman Taurog | ||
| Honor Among Lovers | 1931 | Dorothy Arzner | Claudette Colbert | |
| The Tip-Off | 1931 | Albert Rogell | ||
| Suicide Fleet | 1931 | Albert Rogell | ||
| Carnival Boat | 1932 | Albert Rogell | ||
| The Tenderfoot | 1932 | Ray Enright | Joe E. Brown | |
| The Thirteenth Guest | 1932 | Albert Ray | Lyle Talbot | |
| Hat Check Girl | 1932 | Sidney Lanfield | Sidney Lanfield was the most frequent director on the Addams Family 1960s television show. | |
| You Said a Mouthful | 1932 | Lloyd Bacon | Joe E. Brown | |
| 42nd Street | 1933 | Lloyd Bacon | Warner Baxter, Ruby Keeler,Dick Powell | |
| Broadway Bad | 1933 | Sidney Lanfield | ||
| Gold Diggers of 1933 | 1933 | Mervyn LeRoy | Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell | Featured Rogers' famous performance of "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)," directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. |
| Professional Sweetheart | 1933 | William A. Seiter | Norman Foster | |
| A Shriek in the Night | 1933 | Albert Ray | Lyle Talbot | |
| Don't Bet on Love | 1933 | Murray Roth | Lew Ayres | Ginger Rogers and Lew Ayres were married for seven years following this film. |
| Sitting Pretty | 1933 | Harry Joe Brown | Jack Oakie, Jack Haley | |
| Flying Down to Rio | 1933 | Thornton Freeland | Dolores Del Rio, Gene Raymond, Fred Astaire | The first of the Astaire–Rogers pairing. This is the only movie where Rogers is billed above Astaire. |
| Chance at Heaven | 1933 | William A. Seiter | Joel McCrea | |
| Rafter Romance | 1933 | William A. Seiter | Norman Foster | |
| Finishing School | 1934 | Wanda Tuchock and George Nicholas | Beulah Bondi | |
| Twenty Million Sweethearts | 1934 | Ray Enright | Dick Powell | |
| Change of Heart | 1934 | John G. Blystone | Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell | |
| Upperworld | 1934 | Roy Del Ruth | Mary Astor | |
| The Gay Divorcee | 1934 | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire | |
| Romance in Manhattan | 1934 | Stephen Roberts | ||
| Roberta | 1935 | William A. Seiter | Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire,Randolph Scott | Lucille Ball has an uncredited appearance as a model. She had lines deleted since her character was supposed to be a French model and she could not perfect the accent. |
| Star of Midnight | 1935 | Stephen Roberts | William Powell | |
| Top Hat | 1935 | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire | |
| In Person | 1935 | William A. Seiter | George Brent | |
| Follow the Fleet | 1936 | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott, Lucille Ball | |
| Swing Time | 1936 | George Stevens | Fred Astaire | |
| Shall We Dance | 1937 | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire | |
| Stage Door | 1937 | Gregory La Cava | Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick, Lucille Ball | |
| Having Wonderful Time | 1938 | Alfred Santell | Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lucille Ball, Red Skelton | This used much of the same cast as Stage Door. |
| Vivacious Lady | 1938 | George Stevens | James Stewart, Charles Coburn, Hattie McDaniel | |
| Carefree | 1938 | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel | |
| The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle | 1939 | H. C. Potter | Fred Astaire | |
| Bachelor Mother | 1939 | Garson Kanin | David Niven, Charles Coburn | |
| Fifth Avenue Girl | 1939 | Gregory La Cava | ||
| Primrose Path | 1940 | Gregory La Cava | Joel McCrea | |
| Lucky Partners | 1940 | Lewis Milestone | Ronald Colman, Jack Carson | |
| Kitty Foyle | 1940 | Sam Wood | Dennis Morgan, James Craig | Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress the first year that the Academy was not announcing the winners before the ceremony. She beat Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Martha Scott, and former co-starKatharine Hepburn. |
| Tom, Dick and Harry | 1941 | Garson Kanin | Burgess Meredith | |
| Roxie Hart | 1942 | William A. Wellman | Adolphe Menjou | |
| Tales of Manhattan | 1942 | Julien Duvivier | Henry Fonda, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth, Gail Patrick | |
| The Major and the Minor | 1942 | Billy Wilder | Ray Milland | Rogers campaigned hard for Billy Wilder and as a result this became his debut film. This remains one of Rogers' favorite movies. Near the end of the movie her real life mother, Lela Rogers, played her character's mother. |
| Once Upon a Honeymoon | 1942 | Leo McCarey | Cary Grant | |
| Tender Comrade | 1943 | Edward Dmytryk | ||
| Lady in the Dark | 1944 | Mitchell Leisen | Ray Milland, Warner Baxter | |
| I'll Be Seeing You | 1944 | William Dieterle | Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple | |
| Week-End at the Waldorf | 1945 | Robert Z. Leonard | Lana Turner | Remake of the 1932 film Grand Hotel portraying the ballerina who was first played on screen by Greta Garbo. |
| Heartbeat | 1946 | Sam Wood | Adolphe Menjou | |
| Magnificent Doll | 1946 | Frank Borzage | David Niven, Burgess Meredith | |
| It Had to Be You | 1947 | Don Hartman and Rudolph Mate | Cornel Wilde | |
| The Barkleys of Broadway | 1949 | Charles Walters | Fred Astaire | Originally Rogers' role was meant for Judy Garland who had recently starred in the successful musical Easter Parade with Astaire. However she had to drop out of the project due to health issues and Rogers was sought as a last minute replacement. This is the only Astaire–Rogers film not released by RKO and the only one filmed in color (although the "I Used to Be Color Blind" number inCarefree was originally filmed in Technicolor). |
| Perfect Strangers | 1950 | Bretaigne Windust | Dennis Morgan | |
| Storm Warning | 1951 | Stuart Heisler | Ronald Reagan, Doris Day | |
| The Groom Wore Spurs | 1951 | Richard Whorf | Jack Carson | |
| We're Not Married | 1952 | Edmund Goulding | Marilyn Monroe, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Victor Moore | |
| Monkey Business | 1952 | Howard Hawks | Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn | |
| Dreamboat | 1952 | Claude Binyon | ||
| Forever Female | 1953 | Irving Rapper | William Holden | |
| Black Widow | 1954 | Nunnally Johnson | Gene Tierney | |
| Twist of Fate | 1954 | David Miller | released in Great Britain asBeautiful Stranger; Rogers' husband at the time, Jacques Bergerac, appeared in the film. | |
| Tight Spot | 1955 | Phil Karlson | Edward G. Robinson, Brian Keith, Lorne Green, Eve McVeagh | |
| The First Traveling Saleslady | 1956 | Arthur Lubin | Clint Eastwood | |
| Teenage Rebel | 1956 | Edmund Goulding | ||
| Oh, Men! Oh, Women! | 1957 | Nunnally Johnson | David Niven | |
| Quick, Let's Get Married! | 1964 | William Dieterle | Ray Milland | Also known as "The Confession." |
| Harlow | 1965 | Alex Segal | Carol Lynley | Rogers' last film. |
Short subjects
- A Day of a Man of Affairs (1929)
- A Night in a Dormitory (1930)
- Campus Sweethearts (1930)
- Office Blues (1930)
- Hollywood on Parade (1932)
- Screen Snapshots (1932)
- Hollywood on Parade No. A-9 (1933)
- Hollywood Newsreel (1934)
- Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936)
- Show Business at War (1943)
- Battle Stations (Narrator, 1944)
- Screen Snapshots: The Great Showman (1950)
- Screen Snapshots: Hollywood's Great Entertainers (1954)
Television
- The DuPont Show with June Allyson, as Kay Neilson in "The Tender Shoot" (October 18, 1959)
- What's My Line? (1954, 1957, 1963)
- The Jack Benny Program (1957)
- The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom (1959)
- Cinderella (1965)
- Here's Lucy (1971) (episode 4.11)
- The Love Boat (1979) (episodes 3.10 and 3.11)
- Glitter (1984) (episode 1.3)
- Hotel (1987) (episode 5.1) (final screen role)
Stage Work
- Top Speed (1929)
- Girl Crazy (1930)
- Love and Let Love (1951)
- The Pink Jungle (1959)
- Annie Get Your Gun (1960)
- Bell, Book and Candle (1960)
- Calamity Jane (1961)
- Husband and Wife (1962)
- The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1963)
- A More Perfect Union (1963)
- Tovarich (1964)
- Hello, Dolly! (1965)
- Mame (1969)
- Coco (1971)
- No, No, Nanette (1974)
- Forty Carats (1974)
- Anything Goes (1980)
- Miss Moffat (1983)
- Charley's Aunt (1984)
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