Page "Ginger Rogers" Paragraph 18

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.

In Roxie Hart ( 1942 ), based on the same play which served as the template for the later musical Chicago, Ginger played a wise-cracking wife on trial for a murder her husband committed.

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, with Joseph Cotten ; La Cava's 5th Avenue Girl ( 1939 ), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family ; and especially the sharp and highly successful comedies: Bachelor Mother ( 1939 ), with David Niven, in which she played Polly Parrish, a shop girl who is falsely thought to have abandoned her baby ; 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.