Personal Life and Death
Fosse was first married in 1949 to dance partner Mary Ann Niles. The marriage lasted until 1951. Fosse's second marriage was to dancer Joan McCracken (December 1952-59). His third wife was dancer/actress Gwen Verdon in 1960; they had a daughter, Nicole Providence Fosse, who is an actress and dancer. He separated from Verdon in the 1970s, but they remained legally married until his death. Verdon never remarried. During rehearsals for The Conquering Hero in 1961, it became known that Fosse had epilepsy, when he suffered a seizure on the stage.
On September 23, 1987, Bob Fosse died from a heart attack at George Washington University Hospital. He died as the revival of Sweet Charity was opening at the nearby National Theatre. Fosse was cremated. In late September, his wife and daughter took his ashes to Quogue, New York, where Fosse had been openly living with his girlfriend of four years, and scattered his ashes in the Atlantic Ocean.
His first wife, and former dance partner, Mary Ann Niles, died one month later from lung cancer, aged 64.
Read more about this topic: Bob Fosse
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)