Welcome to Heilman & Haver - Episode 72. We hope you enjoy the show!

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IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Patricia Ward Kelly

Patricia is an accomplished writer, scholar, freelance journalist, and the widow and official biographer of Gene Kelly. She and Kelly met at the Smithsonian in 1985, when he was the host/narrator for a television special for which she was a writer. Soon after, he invited her to California to write his memoirs, a job for which she recorded his words nearly every day for over ten years. They were together until his death in 1996.

Currently, Patricia serves as Trustee of The Gene Kelly Image Trust and is the President and Creative Director of The Gene Kelly Legacy, Inc. She lives in Los Angeles where she is completing a book about her late husband. As part of this work, she is preserving and cataloging The Gene Kelly Archives — an extensive collections of letters, manuscripts, photographs, scripts, interviews, essays, poems, holograph notes, and memorabilia that will eventually be the basis of additional publications and, ultimately, the core of an innovative, virtual Gene Kelly “experience.”

Mrs. Kelly has recorded commentary for the DVDs of An American in Paris, The Pirate, Words and Music, Xanadu, and Hello, Dolly!, and is frequently called upon to introduce Gene’s films in theaters and at festivals, including two years at the TCM Classic Film Festival. She has been interviewed extensively on TCM and has represented her husband’s legacy on numerous PBS specials and pledge drives and on the popular television shows So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars. She regularly hosts scores of dancers and other artists from around the world at her home, sharing insights about the life and work of her late husband through an intimate tour of The Gene Kelly Archives.

Patricia has appeared in An Evening with Mrs. Gene Kelly in several cities around the world and her one-woman tribute — Gene Kelly: The Legacy, An Evening with Patricia Ward Kelly — sold out two nights at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on the occasion of Kelly’s centenary in 2012 and has been touring across the United States and abroad the past four years, with sold-out performances at Lincoln Center, The Pasadena Playhouse, Laguna Playhouse, the Sedona Film Festival, and many, many more.

In two weeks - Friday, March 17th through Sunday, March 19th - Patricia will be in Seattle to host another one of a kind event, this time at Benaroya Hall - Gene Kelly: A Life in Music. Gene Kelly dancing on the big screen accompanied live by the Seattle Symphony! Patricia joined us now from her home Los Angeles.

Connect with Patricia and keep up on the latest Gene Kelly news: