Patricia Ward Kelly and Gene Kelly in 1994. (Photo by Albane Navizet)

Patricia Ward Kelly, the widow of legendary performer Gene Kelly, wrote down everything her husband said—and we mean everything.

Mrs. Kelly recalled this prodigious note-taking yesterday in an interview with The Observer. “It was constant: what we were doing, what we were eating, the people we were meeting, what Gene was saying,” she said. “In fact, we were sitting at dinner once and he said, ‘You’re not writing anything down.’ And I told him, ‘I’m eating!’”

Over two nights this week, Friday and Saturday, Mrs. Kelly will give two special multimedia presentations at Lincoln Center about the life and work of her husband, who she calls “more of a creator than a performer,” culled from this rich archival material. Her program is part of the Film Society's 23-film retrospective entitled "The Invitation to the Dance: Gene Kelly @ 100," which honors the centenary of Mr. Kelly's birth and runs through July 26.

For her presentations Mrs. Kelly strived to create a theatrical experience rather than a lecture.

“[These presentations will] enable people to grasp what before they didn’t really have any access to,” Mrs. Kelly said. “They just saw him up on the screen, but they had no idea that he used to sit in a chair with a little screen that constantly ran in his brain. That’s how he choreographed.”

Friday's performance will contain special pieces of memorabilia, personal stories about his life and untimely death, and some never-before-heard audio recordings.

On Saturday, Mrs. Kelly will delve into extensive detail of her husband’s filmic innovations such as his use of panning and double exposure, how he staged the parade in Hello Dolly to give the audience the sensation as if as they were truly “behind the scenes.”

Mrs. Kelly, a film historian, also noted that the two of them would pore over his films together, as research.

“It was like a class for me, ‘Movies 101,’” Mrs. Kelly recalled candidly. “He wasn’t crazy about watching his own movies, but he did it with me for homework.”

She and Mr. Kelly met in 1985 at the Smithsonian, when he was the host for a television special for which she was a writer. Soon after, he invited the woman living under a rock (she insists to this day she had no idea that he was famous) to California to write his memoir, a job she assumed would be a two-week gig. Instead, it evolved into her recording his words nearly every day for over ten years, and led to a happy marriage (Mr. Kelly's third) until his death in 1996.

This interviewing process never left the couple’s relationship even after marriage, creating an unusual dynamic that Mrs. Kelly compared to that of Picasso and Françoise Gilot.

“We sat in this room together and just quoted poetry back and forth and played word games, and then I began to hear the number of languages he spoke: French, Latin and Yiddish,” she recalled.

Mrs. Kelly hopes her husband will be remembered as she remembers him: for changing the look of dance on film, not just for his dancing.

“People don’t think of him the same way I do, they don’t think of him as this very, very cerebral guy,” Mrs. Kelly said earnestly. “They think of him as this kind of happy-go-lucky guy that would just go around dancing in the street, when in fact he was a guy who preferred to stay at home and read a book and do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. He was a real brainiac, and I absolutely loved that.”