Robert Alton
| Robert Alton | |
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| Born |
Robert Alton Hart January 28, 1906 Bennington, Vermont, US |
| Died | June 12, 1957 (aged 51) Los Angeles, California, US |
| Occupation | Choreographer, dancer |
| Spouse(s) | Marjorie Fielding (1926-1929) |
Robert Alton (28 January 1906 – 12 June 1957) was an American dancer and choreographer, a major figure in dance choreography of Broadway and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s through to the early 1950s. He is principally remembered today as the discoverer of Gene Kelly, for his collaborations with Fred Astaire, and for choreographic sequences he designed for Hollywood musicals such as The Harvey Girls (1946), Show Boat (1951), and White Christmas (1954).
Born Robert Alton Hart in Bennington, Vermont, Alton studied dance with Ralph McKernan in Springfield, Massachusetts and spent his summers in New York studying with Bert French and Mikhail Mordkin, formerly of the Bolshoi Ballet and Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. His Broadway stage dancing début was with Mordkin's company in Take It from Me (1919), followed by Greenwich Follies (1924) and Same Day (1925) which failed to make it to Broadway.
With his wife Marjorie Fielding he created a dance act and subsequently managed a line of chorus girls in vaudeville. When his wife took a sabbatical to have a baby, he took over dance direction at St. Louis movie theatres while teaching at Clark's Dance School in St. Louis. There his students included Donn Arden and Betty Grable.
After a series of successful stagings at New York's Paramount Theatre in 1933, he began a choreographic career which encompassed many of the most successful Broadway hits of the 1930s and 1940s, collaborating with Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. He learned stage direction from John Murray Anderson and during his Broadway career he was instrumental in furthering the careers of Ray Bolger, John Brascia, Don Crichton, Betty Grable, Gene Kelly, Sheree North, Vera-Ellen and Charles Walters, among others.
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