Gwyneth Evelyn Verdon, known to the world as Gwen, was born on January 13, 1925, in Culver City, California, into a household already connected to the worlds of performance and spectacle. Her father, Joseph William Verdon, worked as an electrician at MGM Studios, and her mother, Gertrude, was a former vaudevillian who had performed with the Denishawn dance troupe and gone on to become a dance teacher. Both parents were English immigrants who had come to the United States by way of Canada, and the family's roots in entertainment gave young Gwen an environment steeped in movement, music, and theatrical ambition.
Her early years were complicated by a physical challenge that might have derailed any dreams of a dancing career before they began. As a toddler, Verdon suffered from rickets, a condition that weakened her bones and forced her to spend years in orthopedic boots and rigid leg braces. Other children called her Gimpy, and her physical limitations seemed to close the door on any conventional childhood. But her mother responded to the diagnosis not with resignation but with action: at three years old, Gwen was enrolled in dance classes, with the belief that movement and exercise might strengthen her legs.
The gamble paid off spectacularly. Ballet training gradually strengthened her legs, improved her carriage, and revealed a talent of extraordinary range and magnetism. By the age of six she was dancing on stage, and she went on to study an astonishing variety of forms: tap, jazz, ballroom, flamenco, and Balinese dance, as well as juggling. At eleven, she made her film debut, appearing as a solo ballerina in The King Steps Out, a 1936 musical romance directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Grace Moore and Franchot Tone. She attended Hamilton High School in Los Angeles and studied under the noted ballet enthusiast Ernest Belcher. While still in high school, she was cast in a revival of Show Boat.
Her path through young adulthood was interrupted by a difficult turn. In 1942, when Verdon was seventeen, she became pregnant by James Henaghan, a tabloid reporter and family acquaintance. At the insistence of her parents she married him, quit dancing, and focused on raising their child. It was a detour of several years, but it did not extinguish her ambitions. After her divorce, she left her son Jimmy in the care of her parents and returned to the world of dance and performance.
Her professional relaunch came through an unlikely but crucial apprenticeship. She found work as an assistant to Jack Cole, one of the most respected and inventive choreographers working in both Broadway and Hollywood during the 1940s and early 1950s. During five years with Cole she honed her craft, took small specialty dancer roles in movie musicals, and taught dance to an extraordinary roster of Hollywood stars including Jane Russell, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe. The experience gave her a technical polish and professional depth that would shortly make her one of Broadway's most sought-after performers.
Her breakthrough came when choreographer Michael Kidd cast her as the second female lead in Cole Porter's Can-Can in 1953. Her interpretation of Eve in the Garden of Eden ballet was so electrifying that out-of-town reviewers reported she had upstaged the show's star, the French prima donna Lilo, who reportedly demanded that Verdon's role be reduced to little more than two featured dance numbers. A lesser performer might have accepted the diminishment and soldiered on. But on opening night in New York, Verdon's performance was so transcendent that the audience screamed for her until she was brought back from her dressing room, still in a towel, to take a curtain call. She received a pay increase and her first Tony Award.
Her following show made her a genuine star of the American musical theater. George Abbott's Damn Yankees in 1955, based on the novel about a baseball fan who sells his soul to the devil, ran for 1,019 performances and gave Verdon the role of Lola, the devil's seductive emissary, that would become permanently associated with her name. She won another Tony Award and later repeated the role in the 1958 film version, singing Whatever Lola Wants and partnering with director-choreographer Bob Fosse, the man who would become her second husband and her most important creative collaborator, in the mambo duet Who's Got the Pain.
Verdon went on to win yet another Tony for New Girl in Town, establishing herself as arguably the dominant female performer of the Broadway musical stage in the late 1950s. Her partnership with Fosse, both professional and personal, defined much of her subsequent career. She originated the title role in Sweet Charity and played Roxie Hart in the original production of Chicago, two iconic performances in what became two of the most celebrated musicals in the American theater canon. After Fosse's death in 1987, Verdon devoted considerable energy to preserving and extending his legacy, ensuring that future audiences would have access to his revolutionary choreographic work.
Gwen Verdon died on October 18, 2000, at the age of seventy-five. She had won four Tony Awards, overcame a childhood disability to become the most celebrated Broadway dancer of her era, and collaborated with Bob Fosse to create works that redefined the American musical theater. The girl who wore orthopedic boots and was called Gimpy had, by any measure, danced her way into history.
