This is worth coming back for. In the clip I posted from the 1976 Academy Awards, Ray Bolger says, "It all happened forty years ago. Forty years ago, I was twenty-four years old." That would lead one to believe Mr. Bolger was 64 years old at that moment, right?
Wrong. Ray Bolger was born in 1904 so he was 72. I should have caught that.
I never understood why people fib like that about their ages. Granted, it was harder to check out in the days before Google but it was still not difficult to get caught. And Bolger's dance number would have been even more impressive if people had been aware it was being performed by a guy in his seventies.
I knew an actress once who though well into her eighties, kept telling everyone she was in her sixties even though it meant she would have made her screen debut playing an adult two years before she was born. She wasn't fooling anyone. She did however briefly panic a much younger actress I was dating who looked at her and said, "You mean I'm going to look like that when I'm sixty?"