He's a genius...a classical dancer like I never saw in my life. - Fred Astaire

[Leslie] Caron is one of only six women who danced with Kelly and Fred Astaire in movies. She says that while Kelly always danced close to the ground, with Astaire (in 1955’s Daddy Long Legs) she felt as if she was floating. Who did she prefer? She gives me a look. "It's not fair to ask me that. For 70 years, I've refused to answer that. A great dancer is a great dancer." She says they were such different men – Kelly tough and generous, Astaire urbane and genteel.

He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time.

You know, you so-and-so, you've a little of the hoodlum in you.