Ginger Rogers George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in "Girl Crazy" made her an overnight star at the age of 19. Rogers' first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929—"Night in the Dormitory", "A Day of a Man of Affairs", and "Campus Sweethearts". In 1930, she was signed by Paramount Pictures to a seven-year contract. Rogers soon got herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens—and moved with her mother to Hollywood. When she
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