I recently watched Flashdance ...
Question: I recently watched Flashdance and have to ask: Was Jennifer Beals really doing the dance at the end? If not, did she do any of the dancing in the movie?
Answer: Jennifer Beals, currently featured on Showtime's racy The L Word, was doubled extensively for Flashdance (1983), though there are sequences in which she's clearly executing basic moves: The rule of thumb with dancing in movies is that the minute you no longer see the actor's face and legs in the same shot, you should wonder whether the face and legs belong to someone else. Ditto goes for shots in which the actor's face is obscured by angle or by distance. The first question you might well ask is, if someone is making a movie that requires a lot of dancing, why not hire a dancer? And a good question it is: But the fact is that dancers who can really, seriously act are as rare as actors who can really, seriously dance. Very well, you may say, but Jennifer Beals wasn't exactly Vanessa Redgrave, so maybe they would have done better to audition dancers until they found someone who was cute and charismatic — it's not as though the role of welder-by-day, aspiring-ballerina-by-night Alex Owens really required world-class acting skills. And by any logical standard, you'd be absolutely right. But the producers of Flashdance had a very specific — and sufficiently vulgar that I'm not going to spell it out — standard that the actress they eventually cast as Alex had to meet, and Beals met it. In any event, most of Beals' dancing was doubled by a French actress/dancer named Marine Jahan, whose most notable other credit was as a strip-club dancer in Streets of Fire (1984). In addition, I've read that a woman named Sharon Shapiro, a much-lauded winning member of UCLA's women's gymnastics team in the early '80s, was used for some of the leaps in Flashdance's audition sequence, and that pioneering break dancer Richard "Crazy Legs" Colon, a member of the Rock Steady crew and only 17 at the time, did the breaking in that same sequence. In any event, Beals took a lot of largely undeserved flak for not doing all her own dancing: I mean, do most people really believe that the average action-movie star really does all his own stunts? Jumping off buildings, running through fire, crashing cars, all that dangerous and potentially career-ending stuff? I don't think so.
