Vincente Minnelli

A tent theatre childhood, 1903–1931

Lester Anthony Minnelli was born in Chicago on 28 February 1903. His father, Vincent Charles Minnelli, and his uncle Frank ran the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater, a travelling show, and his mother, Mina LeBeau, acted in it under the name Mina Gennell. He performed with the company as a child. Winters were spent with relatives in Delaware, Ohio, where the family eventually settled, which is why many accounts give that town as his birthplace. It was not; Chicago was.

He later took his father's first name and added an e to the end of it. After high school in Chicago he went to work as an apprentice window dresser at Marshall Field's, the department store, and that job set the direction of everything afterwards. It gave him a lasting interest in costume, colour and decoration, and taught him to build a scene inside a frame for people walking past.

The designer years: Radio City and Broadway, 1931–1940

A. J. Balaban hired him to design costumes and then sets for the Balaban and Katz cinema chain, working at the Chicago Theatre. He moved to New York in 1931. When Radio City Music Hall opened in December 1932 he was its chief costume designer, and he was soon promoted to art director. The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers number he designed there is still performed by the Rockettes.

In 1935 the Shubert brothers signed him to produce and design three Broadway revues in eighteen months, and he began directing as well as designing. At Home Abroad (1935) was his first, and it was well reviewed. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 followed, with Josephine Baker, Bob Hope and Eve Arden in the cast, then The Show Is On, which opened on Christmas Day 1936, Hooray for What! (1937), and Very Warm for May (1939), the last work Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II made together.

The producer Arthur Freed brought him to MGM on 2 April 1940 at $300 a week, into the production unit that became known by Freed's name and made most of the studio's musicals. Minnelli spent two years directing musical numbers inside other people's films before he was given one of his own.

Cabin in the Sky and Meet Me in St. Louis, 1943–1945

His first feature as director was Cabin in the Sky, released in April 1943, with an all-Black cast led by Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson and Lena Horne, and with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington also appearing. It was Horne's only leading role in an MGM musical. Some cinemas in the American South refused to show films with Black performers in leading parts. In one Tennessee town the projection was stopped half an hour in, on the local sheriff's orders.

Meet Me in St. Louis followed in 1944, a Technicolor family picture set around the 1904 World's Fair, and it made his reputation. It also introduced him to its star, Judy Garland, whom he married on 15 June 1945. Their daughter Liza Minnelli was born on 12 March 1946, and the marriage ended in 1951. He directed Garland again in The Clock (1945), in a straight dramatic part, and then made Father of the Bride (1950) with Spencer Tracy.

An American in Paris, 1951: a ballet built from six painters

An American in Paris follows an ex-serviceman who stays on in Paris to paint, played by Gene Kelly, and a young Frenchwoman played by Leslie Caron in her first film. Arthur Freed produced it and the score is George Gershwin's. At the Academy Awards in March 1952 it won six Oscars including Best Picture. Minnelli was nominated for Best Director and lost to George Stevens.

The film is remembered for the danced sequence that closes it, about seventeen minutes long and costing roughly $450,000. Each part of it stages a Paris setting in the manner of a different painter. Irene Sharaff designed the sets and costumes, under the art director Preston Ames, who had studied architecture in Paris. Thirty scene painters worked six weeks on the backdrops, some of which measured 300 feet by 40, and the whole thing was shot across 44 sets.

The painters, in the order the ballet uses them:

• Raoul Dufy — the Place de la Concorde, in his light line-and-wash manner. The ballet opens here and returns here at the end.
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir — the flower market, where the two dancers pursue each other among the stalls.
• Maurice Utrillo — a Montmartre street, nearly monochrome, in the manner of his white period.
• Henri Rousseau — the fair, staged in his flat and deliberately naive style.
• Vincent van Gogh — the Place de l'Opéra, under swirling turbulent skies.
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — the Moulin Rouge at night, with Gene Kelly costumed as the dancer Chocolat from Lautrec's Chocolat dansant dans un bar.

One thing the film is not is a Paris location picture. Almost all of it was shot on the MGM backlot at Culver City. A second unit worked in Paris between 2 and 22 September 1950, and what it brought back amounts to an opening montage and some long shots. The Paris on the screen is a set built by people who had studied the paintings.

Lust for Life, 1956: filming Van Gogh where Van Gogh painted

Lust for Life, taken from Irving Stone's novel, put Kirk Douglas on screen as Vincent van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin. Quinn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Douglas was nominated and did not win. John Houseman produced, and said the aim was to integrate the painter's life and his work.

Minnelli shot it between August and December 1955 in the actual places, which was unusual for an MGM production of that period. The locations were The Hague and elsewhere in the Netherlands, the Borinage mining district in Belgium, and Paris, Arles and Auvers in France. He pushed the studio into using Ansco Color rather than its usual stock because he wanted a different range, and MGM bought up the remaining supply of the negative.

He designed the film's palette to track the painter's own, greys through the mining scenes and red accents in Paris. Two hundred enlarged colour photographs of Van Gogh canvases were used on set, along with copies painted for the production. More than twenty museums and private collections gave permission for the originals to be photographed.

Gigi, 1958: nine nominations and nine awards

Gigi is adapted from the 1944 novella by Colette, about a Parisian girl being trained by her family for a career as a courtesan, and the wealthy young man who ends by proposing marriage instead. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the screenplay and lyrics and Frederick Loewe the music. Leslie Caron played Gigi, with Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold. Cecil Beaton designed the costumes and the production.

Unlike An American in Paris, this one really was made in Paris, at Maxim's, in the Bois de Boulogne, at the Palais de Glace and at the Musée Jacquemart-André. It was released on 15 May 1958. At the Academy Awards the following spring it was nominated nine times and won nine times, a clean sweep and a record at the time. It took Best Picture, and gave Minnelli the only Academy Award he ever received for directing.

The last films, and his death in 1986

Minnelli was never only a director of musicals. Some Came Running (1958), with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine, and Home from the Hill (1960), with Robert Mitchum, are melodramas, and his standing among critics rests as much on those as on the musicals. He married three more times after Judy Garland: Georgette Magnani, with whom he had a second daughter, Tina Nina, in 1955; Denise Radosavljevic; and in 1980 Margaretta Lee Anderson, who survived him. He published an autobiography in 1974, I Remember It Well, borrowing its title from the Lerner and Loewe duet in Gigi.

His last film was A Matter of Time (1976), with his daughter Liza Minnelli and Ingrid Bergman. The distributor took the film away from him and cut his three-hour version to ninety-seven minutes, releasing it to bad reviews. Minnelli disowned it, and Martin Scorsese criticised the company publicly for how he had been treated.

He died at his home in Beverly Hills on 25 July 1986, aged 83, of emphysema complicated by pneumonia, after a year of repeated stays in hospital. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. French critics had taken him seriously as the author of his films well before American ones did, and the writers at Cahiers du cinéma interviewed him at length in the 1960s.