Donald O’Connor, the breezy song-and-dance comedian who created movie magic with his spirited rendition of “Make ’em Laugh” in the musical “Singin’ in the Rain” and also played lovable straight man to a talking mule named Francis, died Saturday. He was 78.
Mr. O’Connor died of heart failure at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Calabasas, Calif., surrounded by his family, said his daughter, Alicia. In 1999, O’Connor suffered a severe bout of viral pneumonia with heart and lung complications, requiring nine months’ recuperation, but eventually he returned to limited performing.
“Even when he was in pain,” his daughter said of his brief recent illness, “he was still trying to make people laugh. Only two nights ago he told us, `I’d just like to thank the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get.'”
Mr. O’Connor and his wife of 47 years, Gloria, lived in Sedona, Ariz., but had returned to the Los Angeles area after he became ill.
Mr. O’Connor, who made more than 70 films during his long career and hosted the first televised Academy Awards show, had won every major honor–Emmy, Peabody, Golden Globe and Sylvania–except the Oscar.
With an athletic spring in his step and a charming, boy-next-door persona, Mr. O’Connor devoted his life to show business, from the circus and vaudeville to movies, television, nightclubs, symphony halls and the Broadway stage.
But it was his role with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in the classic 1952 MGM musical “Singin’ in the Rain”–widely considered the best musical Hollywood ever produced–that will live as his greatest screen accomplishment.
In the film, Mr. O’Connor performs a remarkable self-choreographed dance routine in which he runs up a wall and does a back flip, makes crazy faces and dazzles audiences with acrobatic antics surrounding a couch and other props.
Mr. O’Connor became a teen idol in the 1940s when, paired with starlets such as Peggy Ryan, Gloria Jean and Ann Blyth, he performed in a string of lucrative, low-budget musicals for Universal Pictures.
Then segueing into an adult career in the early 1950s, he played straight man to a talking mule named Francis in silly but popular comedies such as “Francis Goes to the Races” and “Francis Goes to West Point.”
“I have worked with a lot of jackasses!” he once quipped. The son of circus trapeze artists turned vaudevillians, Mr. O’Connor was born Aug. 28, 1925, in Chicago and was carried onstage for applause when he was 3 days old. Mr. O’Connor said performing was so much a part of his childhood that he thought it strange that other children didn’t work.
As for “Singin’ in the Rain,” Mr. O’Connor hadn’t been given a solo routine until, by chance, composer-arranger Roger Edens came to him with a number called “Make ‘Em Laugh.”
“Kelly said, `Why don’t you take the girls’–his assistants–`and a piano player and see what you can come up with,'” Mr. O’Connor recalled. “I started doing pratfalls and whatever they laughed at, I said, `Write it down.’ That’s how the number came to be.”
Mr. O’Connor also noted that the entire number had to be reshot because they overexposed the film.
“So, I went back and did it again,” he said. “It was no sweat. I felt I did it better the second time.”
