Her Legs Go on Forever: Cyd Charisse at AFI

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THE COMMON TAKE on the dancer-actress Cyd Charisse, who died at 86 last June, is that she was a hell of a dancer.

That's indisputable but incomplete. Indeed, the ballet-trained beauty had a seductress' serpentine majesty when she moved, but for a dancer, she was also one pistol of an actress.

Born Tula Elice Finklea in the great days of studio-mandated name changes (and the great days of Texan-girl names), Charisse would be directed by such greats as Rouben Mamoulian, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli. Seven of her finest films screen at AFI beginning on Saturday.

Her turn as the poison-green-clad temptress in "Singin' in the Rain" (watch video of it below) is Charisse's lushest cameo, but she's a charmer as a Scottish lass in the fantasy "Brigadoon" (1954), a hoot as a Soviet apparatchik in "Silk Stockings" with Fred Astaire (1957) and the soul of melodrama in Minnelli's "Two Weeks in Another Town" (1962). "Beautiful Dynamite: The Films of Cyd Charisse" runs through June 30.

» AFI Silver, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring; opens Sat., through June 30; 301-495-6700. (Silver Spring)

Photo courtesy The Kobal Collection