“The Way You Look Tonight” is a song from the film Swing Time, written by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern, and originally performed by Fred Astaire. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936. In 2004 the Astaire version finished at #43 in AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema.
The song was sung to Ginger Rogers as Penelope “Penny” Carroll by Astaire in character as John “Lucky” Garnett, while Penny was busy washing her hair in an adjacent room. The song was written by Kern with lyrics by Fields, and has become a standard. Fields later remarked, “The first time Jerry played that melody for me I went out and started to cry. The release absolutely killed me. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.”