Sam White (film producer) Sam White (film producer) Sam White was an American film producer, film director and actor. White was born in Los Angeles on to parents who had immigrated from Austria and Hungary. In 1937, he married Claretta Ellis, a studio contract dancer. They were married for 65 years until her death in 2002. For much of the 1930s, Sam White directed numerous musical sequences in films such as "Roberta" with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne; "Old Man Rhythm" with Betty Grable and Buddy Rogers; "Top of the Town" with George Murphy; and "Hooray for Love", with Ann Sothern. During
Ginger Rogers the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage. Rogers' entertainment career was born one night when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She then entered and won a Charleston dance contest which allowed her to tour for six months, at one point in 1926 performing at an 18-month-old theater called The Craterian in Medford, Oregon. This theater honored her many years later by changing its name to the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the