A Quote by Vincente Minnelli

West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York. — © Vincente Minnelli
West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York.
As a young kid I was in love with breakdancing. I practiced the uprock style, which is a battle style of dance that looks like fighting. It comes from the gangs in New York in the 1960s and '70s. It's beautiful, almost like a martial art, and it can be funny, too, because you make fun of each other.
My brother became so enamored with that film [West Side Story], that he started taking tap-dancing lessons, and I followed him and started tap dancing, and my mother and father started tap dancing - I was in a class with my family, tap dancing!
In high school, my first thing ever was I played Tony in 'West Side Story' when I was about 17. I was a really shy kid, and I just, like, forced myself to learn how to sing this one month because I loved 'West Side Story' so much, and I somehow managed to get the role.
I was a Spanish dancer. I don't mean to put that down, because that was great, too, but nothing like the kind of dancing you had to do in 'West Side Story,' which was called jazz.
I was born in the West Village in New York, and then when I was about four my family moved to what they joke is the suburbs, the Upper West Side. I lived there for most of my childhood.
We would also go to musicals. So Singing In the Rain, On the Town, and West Side Story. Especially West Side Story because played that a lot before VCRs, so that would be something that would be a big deal if it came on, you caught it. So that really started, my family was not in show business at all but really loved that kind of thing.
I used to live on Riverside Park in New York, on the Upper West Side.
Everything I learned and didn't do in New York I would put into place here in the London West Hollywood. It's fascinating, when you look at the critics' reviews, and we had a great one in the New York Observer and all that, and then the New York Times came and it was a devastation; two stars out of four. They said that I played safe because it wasn't fireworks. Then they judged the persona over the substance that was on the plate.
I have had a place in New York in the musicians' district on the Upper West Side since 1986.
In my youth, cinemas showed two films in one day. I used to watch both of them. It may sound strange, but 'West Side Story' was the only musical I liked. I didn't like musicals, or films with songs, at all. I always thought they were not real, that the songs sounded a little bit false. But in the case of 'West Side Story,' things were different.
I don't drink coffee I take tea my dear, I like my toast done on one side. And you can hear it in my accent when I talk, I'm an Englishman in New York. See me walking down Fifth Avenue, a walking cane here at my side. I take it everywhere I walk, I'm an Englishman in New York. I'm an alien I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in New York.
I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun.
We were friends with Jonathan Demme. We were all down on the West Side of New York, and I think I met Kurt Vonnegut through Edith Demme. And then I was lucky to do Who Am I This Time? 1982, which was an adaptation of his short story that Jonathan Demme directed with Chris Walken and I, and that really cemented the friendship.
An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which in duty bound, we have to take.
This is my favorite area in New York - the West Village is the heart of New York. I could never move somewhere else.
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
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