Fred Astaire Month at TCM.....

It is Fred Astaire Month over at TCM.  The man who would become the movies' personification of grace, elegance and gentle humor was born Frederick Austerlitz on May 10, 1899, in Omaha, Nebraska, to an Austrian immigrant in the beer business. 

Noel Coward called him "the greatest dancer who ever lived," and Oscar Levant considered him "the best singer of songs the movie world ever knew." 

He performed with Cyd Charisse

Audrey Hepburn

Leslie Caron

Jane Powell

Vera-Ellen

Judy Garland

Joan Leslie

Rita Hayworth

and of course, Ginger Rogers

Audrey Hepburn stamps fetch $606,000 for charity

A rare sheet of 10 stamps depicting Audrey Hepburn fetched euro430,000 ($606,000) at a charity auction in Berlin, two-thirds of which will go to help educate children in sub-Saharan Africa.

The mint-condition sheet of 10 stamps featuring Hepburn, a coy smile on her face and a long, black cigarette holder dangling from her lips, brought a profitable outcome to a botched stamp series that should have been destroyed years ago _ and evokes Hepburn's starring role in the 1963 thriller "Charade," in which the characters chase a set of rare stamps.