MIRIAM NELSON

From Film Choreographers and Dance Directors by Larry Billman...

Miriam Nelson began dance studies in her native Chicago and when her family moved to New York, she studied tap with Ernest Carlos. In a borrowed pair of toe shoes, she auditioned for Billy Rose's Casa Maņana, but instead made her professional debut with an act playing Troy and Schenectady. She eventually played the Casa Maņana and the Mayfair Club in Boston. After making her Broadway debut in 1938 in Sing Out the News, she went on to appear in Yokel Boy and Very Warm for May (1939), Higher and Higher and Panama Hattie (1940) and Let's Face It (1941), working with choreographers Robert Alton, Billy Daniel and Charles Walters and often selected to be line-captain. During this time she met and married noted dancer-choreographer Gene Nelson.

Nelson went to Hollywood and signed an acting-dancing contract with Paramount, where she was featured in Double Indemnity, Here Come the Waves, Duffy's Tavern and Incendiary Blonde before moving on to Columbia for Cover Girl and The Jolson Story. First assisting Paramount dance director Danny Dare, she began choreographing and co-created many of husband Gene's solo routines in his Warner Bros. musicals and coached Doris Day and his other female costars. She continued as one of Hollywood's busiest television and film choreographers as well as being one of the pioneers of spectacular arena show staging with Disney on Parade in 1969. As one of the founders of SHARE, she has staged and produced their annual fund-raising shows for decades, and she finally returned to the stage in longtime-friend Marge Champion's Ballroom at the Long Beach Civic Light Opera in 1992.