Why didn’t Cyd Charisse––who died in Los Angeles on Tuesday at the age of 86––ever fully become the Ginger Rogers to Gene Kelly’s Fred Astaire? To compare Charisse directly to Rogers would be unfair; the former was an athletic show-stopper who regularly held down solos seemingly designed to draw attention to their own difficulty, while the latter’s dance career revolved around the uneviable task of making Fred Astaire’s choreography seem spontaneous and easy. And Charisse also made movies with Astaire––The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings offered two of her biggest roles––but her chemistry with the big baller of ballroom and tap dance was virtually nonexistant. The impossibly leggy, mildly exotic, confident almost to the point of camp Charisse added counterpoint nuance to Kelly’s weird barrel-chested blue-collar ballet. It never felt like it was a perfect pairing, and that was maybe what was exciting about it: as a partner and as a choreographer, Kelly knew how to use and play off their incongruities.

They first danced together in the meta “Broadway Melody Ballet” number from Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a refractory narrative within the narrative, completely inconsequential to the film’s primary story except as an ironic commentary on the impossibility of “pure” romance in the Hollywood workplace. Charisse and Kelly’s two dances here are not only improbably directly sexual, but their relationship––a self-conscious fiction through which Kelly moves from sexual obsession to romantic fantasy to shrugging disavowal and amelioration of disappointment in work––is far more convincing that the Kelly/Debbie Reynolds relationship that plays on the film’s top layer.

As the above clip of “Love Is Nothing But A Racket,” the bizarre mock-violent comic competition number deleted from Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1955 flop It’s Always Fair Weather shows, they had a chemistry that was much rougher than that of Astaire and Rogers. Watching Kelly and Charisse dance, you never get the sense that you’re looking at two people who are destined for life-long love. They look more like two people who are going to really, really hurt one another. That this formula failed to draw much of a following in its day is maybe not so much of a surprise after all.

There is plenty of evidence of Charisse in motion on YouTube.