Hermes Pan Dies; Showed Steps to Astaire, Rogers

Hermes Pan, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning Hollywood choreographer for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire--who once told Pan he was the only person who could dance the way Astaire did--has died. He was 79.

Pan died Wednesday at his Beverly Hills home, according to his niece, Michelene Laski. No cause of death was given.

“He was a darling man, a great dancer,” Rogers said from her ranch in Oregon.

Pan won his Academy Award in 1938 for the “Fun House” sequence in the Astaire film “Damsel in Distress.” He won an Emmy in 1959 for his work on the television special “Astaire Time: An Evening With Fred Astaire.”

A National Film Award for achievement in cinema was presented to him in 1980, and a special award from the Joffrey Ballet in 1986.

Among the other dancers who performed Pan’s steps in his 55 films were Betty Grable, Cyd Charisse and Dan Dailey. Pan also designed water ballets for Esther Williams and ice dances for skating star Sonja Henie.

Born in Tennessee, Hermes Panagiotopulos--his given name--trained privately in Nashville, thereafter moving to New York, where he danced on Broadway for three years, and met Rogers when both were dancing in “Top Speed.”

Pan then came to Hollywood, and soon encountered Astaire on the RKO lot when he landed a job as assistant to dance director Dave Gould for “Flying Down to Rio.”

“At that time,” Pan later told an interviewer, “there was really no dance in pictures--it was all design and camera movement. Dave Gould couldn’t dance, but I could, so he said, ‘Why don’t you go up and see if you can be of assistance to Mr. Astaire?’

“And Fred said to me, ‘Oh, good, you’re a dancer. I’m stuck for a step here. Can you think of anything?’ ”

He suggested a step, and Astaire used it. Pan quickly became dance director for Astaire’s films, and the two men remained close friends for decades.

“He showed Fred something he thought would fit well. It worked, and that was that,” Rogers said Thursday.

“Fred told him he was the only person he ever saw who could dance like he did,” Pan’s niece said.

“We thought so much alike about music and rhythms,” Pan once said in an interview. “The minute I saw him dance, I said, ‘Oh, this is the kind of dancing I love.’ He seemed to be able to do everything I felt inside and wanted to do.”

As dance director for movie musicals for more than four decades, Pan choreographed all but one of the 10 films pairing Astaire and Rogers--”Flying Down to Rio,” “The Gay Divorcee,” “Roberta,” “Top Hat,” “Follow the Fleet,” “Swing Time,” “Shall We Dance” “Carefree” and “The Barkleys of Broadway.”

Pan kept a Lucite cube atop the upright piano in his home, displaying two dance slippers--one of Astaire’s and one of Rogers’.

After the Astaire era, Pan’s work included the 1950s films “Kiss Me Kate,” and “Porgy and Bess”; the 1960s hits “Can-Can,” “My Fair Lady” and the Rome entrance pageant in “Cleopatra”; and in the 1970s, “Darling Lili” and “Lost Horizon.”

Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome, staged for the 1963 movie about the Egyptian ruler’s affair with Julius Caesar, was quite different from the dance numbers Pan usually choreographed, and he relished the experience.

The film was the most expensive ever produced up to that point, and “I was told I could do what I wanted, get anything I wanted and spare no expense,” he told columnist Hedda Hopper. “It was the greatest responsibility of my career.

Pan also performed his own dance steps in some films, including “Moon Over Miami,” “My Gal Sal,” “Sweet Rosie O’Grady,” “Pin Up Girl,” and, with Lana Turner and Ray Milland, “A Life of Her Own.”

Although his films are now regarded as classics, Pan told The Times a few years ago: “When you’re involved in something that later becomes great, you never realize it at the time. You just hope it’s good.”

Pan is survived by his sister and several nieces and nephews.

Services have been scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday in the Church of the Good Shepherd, 505 N. Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills.