Top hats off to the dancer other dancers envy 'He was the only major movie star of the studio era - perhaps of any era - to have had the career his talent meant him to have, and to have had it as long as he liked," That's what the dance critic Arlene Croce wrote about Fred Astaire in the New York Review of Books. It is quite a claim, but one borne out by Astaire's history. He was 34, with a hugely successful Broadway career behind him, when he pitched up at RKO. Although the story of the remarks about his first screen test - "Can't sing, can't act, balding. Can dance a little" - is sadly likely to be apocryphal, he wasn't the most obvious movie star. But from the moment he appeared in Flying Down to Rio (1933) with Ginger Rogers, his dancing lit up the screen. The first Variety critic got it right: "He's distinctly likeable on screen, the mike is kind to his voice and as a dancer he remains in a class by himself." He is, even today, the dancer most idolised by other dancers: Nureyev and Baryshnikov longed to move like Astaire. What they loved, I think, is the way in which both music and movement seem to flow through his entire body. Though dapper and civilised, he looks as if he has been inspired to dance by a primitive force he cannot resist. Look at him in Top Hat - the Irving Berlin musical about to be revived in the West End - and pity poor Tom Chambers stepping into his shoes. He may be able to match Astaire's charm, but he will never come near to the elegant way he shapes his body, or find the still centre out of which the most graceful movement springs. The movie follows the pattern of all the Astaire/Rogers films of this period: solo for Fred, comic duet, solo for Fred, romantic duet, finale. The plot is thin, but Astaire's innovation was to make the singing and the dancing spring organically out of the story. So a sand-dancing solo is a lullaby to Rogers; his courtship of her takes place in the park, in Isn't This a Lovely Day?; his virtuoso solo - in the title song - is part of a stage show. Then there is perhaps the most famous routine in the entire musical - Cheek to Cheek. Rogers danced this in an ostrich feather dress which she had not worn before, and which shed tiny feathers all over Astaire's jacket, into their mouths and eyes, making dancing impossible. Yet the final result seems to carry the transformative force of love itself. It is that ability to make dance into something else that lies at the heart of Astaire's genius as a dancer, and as a choreographer of dance on screen. That very different dance innovator Pina Bausch said: "Dance, dance or we are lost." Astaire would have understood that sentiment. He made it seem effortless, but he knew that dancing was essential.