The Ginger House and heavily involved in the theater, Ginger went on to become a Broadway star at the age of 19, and shortly after, a Hollywood film actress. She is perhaps best known for the nine films she made with Fred Astaire, but she was a huge star before they began working together and making dance films. Ginger visited her hometown several times during her lifetime. In 1942, she visited the home during an interview with LIFE magazine. In 1964, President Harry Truman declared July 16 to be "Ginger Roger's Day," Ginger again visited the home in 1972 when she was in
Ginger Rogers at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. Rogers spent winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford. She continued making public appearances (chiefly at award shows) until suffering a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and dependent on a wheelchair. Despite her stroke, she was a practitioner of Christian Science and never saw a doctor or went to a hospital. Her last husband, William Marshall, would trick Rogers to take insulin since she