Born in New York, USA. Sammy Lee will best be remembered for his great contributions as Dance Director of many important musicals during Hollywood's golden age. He started as a kid dancing in Gus Edwards' Kid acts and was later teamed with Ruby Norton for six years in vaudeville. At 5' 3-1/2", he first acheived fame in New York in the 1920s creating and staging dances for the highly successful Ziegfeld Follies. After contributing dance routines for Ziegfeld's famous productions Showboat, Rio Rita, and the last of the Midnight Frolics, he signed with MGM studios early in 1929. His imaginative dance routines included overhead shots a year before Buzby Berkeley's work in WHOOPEE!. He brought the prestige of the Ziegfeld image to MGM's early musical talkies. Sammy Lee was nominated twice for an academy award for best dance direction: in 1935 for KING OF BURLESQUE, and 1937 for ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN, both at 20th Century Fox. He would return to MGM after a stint at RKO (1937) and directed shorts and choreographed war time musicals. Smaller studios benefited from his talents in 1944 and 1945. During this time he choreographed Columbia's CAROLINA BLUES and Republic's EARL CARROLL'S VANITIES before he retired with Paramount's 1945 release, OUT OF THIS WORLD. Sammy Lee's productive career spanned an impressive sixteen years in Hollywood, and gave us many of cinema's most entertaining moments.    Nominated for Dance Direction 1935: KING OF BURLESQUE "Too Good to Be True" number    Nominated for Dance Direction 1937: ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN "Swing Is Here to Stay" number 2 nominations