Astaire did not retire from dancing completely. He made a series of four highly rated Emmy Award-winning musical specials for television in 1958, 1959, 1960, and 1968. The first of these programs, 1958's “An Evening with Fred Astaire”, won nine Emmy Awards, including "Best Single Performance by an Actor" and "Most Outstanding Single Program of the Year." It was also noteworthy for being the first major broadcast to be prerecorded on color videotape, and has recently been restored. The restoration won technical Emmy in 1988 for Ed Reitan, Don Kent, and Dan Einstein, who restored the original videotape, transferring its contents to a modern format, and filling in gaps where the tape had deteriorated with kinescope footage. Astaire personally won the Emmy for Best Single Performance by an Actor but the choice had a controversial backlash because many felt that his dancing in the special was not the type of "acting" the award was designed for. At one point Astaire even offered to return the award, but the Television Academy refused to consider it.
Astaire played the role of Julian Osborne in the 1959 movie “On the Beach”. It was nominated a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor award for his performance, losing to Stephen Boyd in “Ben Hur “. Astaire's last major musical film was “Finian's Rainbow”, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He shed his white tie and tails to play an Irish rogue who believes if he buries a crock of gold in the shadows of Fort Knox it will multiply. His dance partner was Petula Clark, who portrayed his skeptical daughter. He admitted to being as nervous about singing with her as she confessed to being apprehensive about dancing with him. Unfortunately, the film was a box-office failure, though it has gained a strong reputation over the years since its release.
Astaire continued to act into the 1970s, appearing on television as the father of Robert Wagner's character of Alexander Mundy in “It Takes a Thief “and in films such as “The Towering Inferno”, in which he danced with Jennifer Jones and for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, in the category of Best Supporting Actor. He voiced the mailman narrator in 1970's classic animated film “Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town”. He appeared in the first two “That's Entertainment!” documentaries in the mid 1970s. In the second, aged seventy-six, he performed a number of song-and-dance routines with Kelly, his last dance performances in a musical film.
In the summer of 1975, he made three albums in London, “Attitude Dancing”, “They Can't Take These Away From Me”, and “A Couple of Song and Dance Men”, the last an album of duets with Bing Crosby. In 1976, he played a supporting role as a dog owner in the cult movie “The Amazing Dobermans”. Fred Astaire played Dr. Seamus Scully in the French film “The Purple Taxi”. In 1978, he co-starred with Helen Hayes in a well-received television film, “A Family Upside Down”, in which they play an elderly couple coping with failing health.
Astaire won an Emmy Award for his performance. He made a well-publicized guest appearance on the science fiction television series “Battlestar Galactica” in 1979, as Chameleon, the possible father of Starbuck, in "The Man with Nine Lives", a role written for him by Donald P. Bellisario. Astaire asked his agent to obtain a role for him on Galactica because of his grandchildren's interest in the series. His final film role was the 1981 adaptation of Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story. This horror film was also the last for two of his most prominent castmates, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks,
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