Hermes Pan is best known for his choreographic collaborations with film star Fred Astaire. Over a long career Pan was a choreographer on 89 Hollywood films.
During his lifetime he made no public acknowledgement of his sexuality, but since his death in 1990 friends have confirmed that he was gay.
Born in Memphis in 1909 as Hermes Joseph Panagiotopoulos, his family opened the first theatre in the city. The family fell on hard time after his father died in 1922 and a family dispute broke out, and they moved to New York.
Here a young Hermes shorted his name and began working in the chorus of Broadway shows. In 1930 he met Ginger Rogers when they both appeared in the musical Top Speed. Later that year the family moved to Los Angeles.
In 1933 he was working as an assistant choreographer on the film Flying Down to Rio which began the partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It began a professional relationship with Astaire that saw him being involved in seventeen of Astaire’s musicals.
He worked on all of Astaire and Rogers musicals including The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Carefree, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle and The Barkley’s of Broadway.
He won an Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for his work on 1937’s Damsel in Distress which stared Astaire and Joan Fontaine. He also won an Emmy Award for Astaire’s 1961 television special.
My Fair Lady, Can-Can, Flower Drum Song, Finian’s Rainbow, Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Silk Stocking’s, Kiss Me Kate, Second Chorus, Blues Skies and many more musicals were on his resume.
