You Were Never Lovelier

Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth and Adolphe Menjou star in this lavish 1942 musical set in Buenos Aires. Astaire plays a down-on-his-luck dancer who romances an elegantly cool Hayworth against the wishes of her suspicious father, Menjou.A remake of the Argentine film The Gay Senorita , You Were Never Lovelier was a follow up to the 1942 hit You'll Never Get Rich , and marked the last screen pairing of Astaire and Hayworth. In You Were Never Lovelier, she proves once again to be a stunning dancer, especially in 'Shorty George' and 'I'm Old Fashioned', a sensuous moonlit duet with Astaire that is the high point of the film. Like Astaire, Hayworth was a perfectionist and they spent days going over each number, It was difficult to find sufficient rehearsal space on Columbia's stage's, so the studio rented a funeral parlour at a nearby Hollywood cemetery. Every time a funeral came through, rehearsals would stop until the last of the mourners had left! Their perfectionism paid off, however, in elegant and precise dance sequences. Hayworth wanted to do her own singing, but her voice was dubbed by Nan Wynn - a well-kept secret at the time. Nevertheless, Hayworth has gone on to record saying that You Were Never Lovelier was the favourite of all her films, second only to You'll Never Get Rich .