Definitely, he was a major idol of mine. Hey, we both discovered tap dancing in the hills of Pennsylvania. That doesn’t happen in every neck of the woods.

One day early in the shooting of Rochefort, we were filming in the town square and George noticed that Gene was watching us dance. What?! THE Gene Kelly has his eyes on us? I couldn’t believe it. But there he was, standing next to the camera, talking to Demy. As it turned out, Gene was telling Demy he wanted to stage a dancing scene with George and me.

Oh my god! In less than an hour, we were strutting next to a legend. The magic moment was interrupted by Demy, though, when he realized the three of us dancing together wouldn’t work with the storyline and would ruin the ending, which was already shot. But he managed to keep the new sequence in the movie by replacing George and me with two unnamed dancers.

George and I were crushed. But as I told George – who accused me of being a hopeless romantic – no one can ever take away from us the twenty minutes of dancing with Gene Kelly. And I stand by that.

Gene was everything you’d hope your idol to be: laid back, likeable, sweet, ambitious, and smart as a whip. I was too shy to tell him I hailed from Pittsburgh, as he did. On set, he was a class act. He spoke multiple languages and had an easygoing swagger about him. But he wasn’t showy or flirtatious. Unfortunately, though, his time in Rochefort was limited due to his upcoming project, Hello Dolly, which he was about to direct with Barbra Streisand for Twentieth Century-Fox.