Early Life and Career
Berry was born in Moline, Illinois, one of two children to accountant Darrell and his wife, Bernice. His older sister, Dona Rae, rounded out the family. He is of Swedish-English decent.
Berry realized he wanted to be a dancer and singer at the age of 12, as he watched a kids’ dance performance during a school assembly. He dreamed of starring in movie musicals and would go to the movie theater to see Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in some of his favorite of their films including Easter Parade, Royal Wedding, On the Town and Summer Stock.
After seeing a school performance, Berry immediately started tap dance class and, at age 15, won a local talent competition sponsored by radio and television big band leader Horace Heidt. Heidt asked Berry to join his traveling performance ensemble, "The Horace Heidt Youth Opportunity Program", which was a popular touring group. Berry's parents drove him to Los Angeles to live with the rest of the troupe at the Horace Height ranch in the San Fernando Valley. He toured the U.S. and parts of Europe for 15 months with the program, dancing and singing for the public and at post-World War II Air Force bases overseas. Berry made lasting relationships with several of his co-cast members and Horace's son, Horace Heidt Jr., who later launched a big band and radio career.
After finishing the tour with Horace Heidt, Berry returned to Moline and he and a friend converted an old grocery store into a dance studio where he taught dance. Thinking that teaching dance could be his profession, Berry taught for about a year before deciding to refocus on his own performance career.
Read more about this topic: Ken Berry
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Judgments, value judgments concerning life, whether for or against it, can in the end never be true: their only value is as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities. We must reach out and attempt to put our finger on this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be assessed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)