Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1941 for her starring role in Kitty Foyle (1940). The win established her as a dramatic actress independent of her celebrated dance partnership with Fred Astaire.
Rogers and Astaire made nine films together at RKO between 1933 and 1939, beginning with Flying Down to Rio and ending with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. They reunited for a tenth film, The Barkleys of Broadway, in 1949, produced at MGM.
Ginger Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath on the 16th of July, 1911, in Independence, Missouri. The nickname "Ginger" came from a young cousin who had difficulty pronouncing "Virginia".
Rogers began her career in vaudeville in 1925, when she entered and won a Charleston dance contest at age fourteen in Fort Worth, Texas. The prize allowed her to tour for six months on the Orpheum Circuit as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads.
Rogers played the lead in Mame at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, arriving by the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. She became the highest-paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time, and the production ran fourteen months and included a royal command performance for Queen Elizabeth II.
The quote originates from a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip by cartoonist Bob Thaves. It became widely popular as a summary of Rogers's capacity to match Astaire's choreography while also performing in reverse and in heels.