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Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in 1921. When she was six she caught polio, and she was lucky enough to recover, and her parents started her dancing to regain her strength. She started ballet at 12 and a couple of years later she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and went on a tour of Europe with them. While on tour, she met a dancer named Nico Charisse, and she married him when she turned 18, and they had a son. She also benefited by gaining her husband's last name, a big improvement over "Finklea" (the Cyd came from her childhood nickname, "Sid"). When World War II started, that ended the tours, and she moved to Los Angeles, where she was spotted by MGM and started appearing in their movies in 1943 (during that year, she would be billed under the stage name of "Lily Norwood"), in roles where she danced ballet. She appeared in around 25 MGM movies over the next 15 years. At first she solely danced, and then MGM cast her in some acting roles as "ethnic types" (like as a Polynesian girl in On an Island with You) but soon she was playing regular female leads in movies where she danced as well. Her best known appearance was in the "Broadway Melody" ballet finale from Singin' in the Rain, but she had many other great movies, and she co-starred with both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. She was supposed to play the female lead in An American in Paris, but she was pregnant with her second child, and the role went to Leslie Caron. As the era of musicals came to an end in the late 1950s, Charisse switched over to straight dramatic roles. She had gotten divorced in 1947 and the following year she had married actor Tony Martin, who had previously been married to actress Alice Faye. They remained married for the next 60 years until she passed away in 2008 at the age of 86, and while it is rare for any Hollywood marriage to last a very long time as theirs did, this one was doubly rare, both because it was a second marriage for both of them, and because they were both active show business stars, which normally puts a great strain on any marriage. Charisse was a beautiful, talented, classy lady was a great dancer with incredible legs (in 1952 they were insured for 5 million dollars!). I highly recommend her movies, especially Brigadoon, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and Silk Stockings (a musical remake of Ninotchka)!

Important Added Info: Note that this Dixie Ice Cream Premium has been personally autographed (signed) by Cyd Charisse! Also note that this is a special color 8" x 10" item that was given away as a premium from the Dixie Cup company. The Dixie Cup company created a large number of such premiums, which were given away to kids who sent in Dixie Cup lids. Each premium would have a full-color image of the star on the front, and on the back was biographical information of that star, along with black & white scenes from some of their movies. Every Dixie Cup premium would have two punch holes in one border, and kids would be sent two "covers" (one front and one back) to create a "scrapbook" (the covers gave the instructions on how to make the scrapbook by binding the Dixie Cup premiums between the two covers "with color cord, shoe string, or ribbon". Note that these were first made in the mid-1930s, and they continued all the way to the early 1950s (when the two holes switched to the top of the premium).

Note that this autographed item is part of a remarkable collection. In our last all-signed auction, we auctioned nearly 500 items from this collection and now we are auctioning 162 more items!
     In the 1970s, our consignor was a teacher who taught a film class, and he also part-time ran the local movie theater (and he saved all the presskits from the movies the theater showed).
     Starting in the late 1970s through the late 1980s, he wrote to famous celebrities, and enclosed an 8x10 from his collection, and he wrote a literate personalized letter, talking about his work as a film teacher, and discussing his favorite movie by that star.
     He received signed photos back from a good percentage of the people he wrote to, and if the people simply sent him a stock photo back, he did not save it, but if he felt the autograph was genuine, and if they added a personalized note, then he did save them.
     In the late 1980s, he pretty much stopped sending letters and photos, simply because he was just too busy. So this photo (and the vast majority of the other photos we are auctioning for this consignor) were obtained in the 1980s, through personal correspondence with this star. This is of course excellent, because back at that time celebrities were not selling their signatures nearly as much, and many of the stars were pretty forgotten and were happy to get letters from people like our consignor!
     He of course does not have any "Certificates of Authenticity", but he only kept ones he felt were surely authentic, and those are the ones we are auctioning. However, bidders can certainly compare the signatures to known examples on the internet to judge for themselves. As is true of all the signed items we are currently auctioning, we give every buyer 30 days in which to review what they purchased and they can return any item as long as it is within 30 days of the end of the auction. On non-signed items, we give a "lifetime guarantee" on everything we auction, but on signed items, we give the above modified guarantee of 30 days after the auction closes.

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Bruce Hershenson,
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