Sammy Lee Biography
Sammy Lee will best be remembered for his great contributions as Dance Director of many important musicals during Hollywood's golden age. He first achieved fame in New York as dance director of the highly successful Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. After contributing dance routines for Ziegfeld's famous productions "Showboat", "Rio Rita", and the last of the "Midnight Frolics", he signed with MGM studios early in 1929.
His imaginative dance routines included overhead shots a year before Buzby Berkeley's work in "Whoopee". He brought the prestige of the Ziegfeld image to MGM's early musical talkies. Sammy Lee was nominated twice for an academy award for best dance direction, in 1935 for "King Of Burlesque", and 1937 for "Ali Baba Goes To Town", both at 20th Century Fox.
He would return to MGM after a stint at RKO (1937) and directed shorts and choreographed war time musicals. Smaller studios benefited from his talents in 1944 and 1945. During this time he choreographed Columbia's "Carolina Blues" and Republic's "Earl Carroll's Vanities" before he retired with Paramount's 1945 release, "Out Of This World". Sammy Lee's productive career spanned an impressive sixteen years in Hollywood, and gave us many of cinema's most entertaining moments!
