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...
In 1947, when she was 21, she was persuaded to take the lead role
in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film The Red Shoes, and was
enchanting as Victoria Page, the young ballerina torn between a struggling
composer and a powerful impresario. Released in 1948, it won four Oscar
nominations and made Moira Shearer one of the most widely-known ballerinas in
history
...

Moira Shearer

(Filed: 02/02/2006)

Moira Shearer , who died on Tuesday aged 80, was a strikingly
beautiful leading ballerina with the Sadler's Wells (later the Royal) Ballet;
she was best known for her performance in the film The Red Shoes, which won her
the heart of the writer and broadcaster Ludovic (now Sir Ludovic) Kennedy, whom
she married in 1950.

At one time in the mid-1940s Moira Shearer was compared to the
great Margot Fonteyn; in such roles as Cinderella, Odette in Swan Lake and
Mam'zelle Angot, she enthralled audiences with her flawless technique, light
elegance of style and copper-coloured hair: "No other leading dancer, not even
Fonteyn or Markova," wrote the poet James Kirkup, "demonstrated such
intelligence in her dancing and such profound musicality as did Moira Shearer,
at least among British dancers." There was, he observed, "something intensely
warm and human in her dancing", reminiscent of the style of the "classic
ballerina assoluta".

In 1947, when she was 21, she was persuaded to take the lead role
in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film The Red Shoes, and was
enchanting as Victoria Page, the young ballerina torn between a struggling
composer and a powerful impresario. Released in 1948, it won four Oscar
nominations and made Moira Shearer one of the most widely-known ballerinas in
history.

Her success led to leading roles in other films, such as The
Tales of Hoffmann (1951), The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955) and Black Tights
(1960). But her absence from regular stage performances caused her dancing to
suffer, and she never regained the form she had shown in her early career.
Instead she devoted herself wholeheartedly to being a wife to Ludovic Kennedy
and mother to their four children, though she continued to appear at Covent
Garden and later became a competent stage actress, as well as a writer,
broadcaster and lecturer.

The daughter of a civil engineer, Moira Shearer King was born at
Dunfermline, Fife, on January 17 1926. It was her mother who pushed her into
ballet; she had her first dancing lessons in Northern Rhodesia where her family
moved when she was a child. The family returned to Scotland when she was 10, and
Moira was educated at Dunfermline High School and Bearsden Academy, near
Glasgow. At 14 she entered the Sadler's Wells School.

But, as she admitted later: "I never wanted to be a dancer. When
you're 10 you don't have much say in the matter. I suppose I did enjoy it in a
way - I don't blame Mama at all - but I think what one does should be one's own
choice."

Moira Shearer was launched by Mona Inglesby's new International
Ballet in 1941, but a year later she rejoined the Sadler's Wells organisation
and, until 1945, was one of that band of young dancers which helped to sustain
the ballet on its wartime tours.

Moira Shearer was first in the corps de ballet of Ninette de
Valois's Orpheus and Eurydice in 1943. Within two years she was dancing major
classic roles. The next year she appeared in Robert Helpmann's Miracle in the
Gorbals and as Odette in Swan Lake, a performance that, according to one critic,
"made the audience gasp".

At Covent Garden in 1946 she appeared with Margot Fonteyn and
Pamela May in Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations. When his three-act
Cinderella was launched in December 1948, she was the first to dance the title
role, with Michael Somes as the Prince and Ashton and Helpmann as the Ugly
Sisters. She also danced the cancan with Leonide Massine in his Boutique
Fantasque during the 1948-49 season.

By that time she had made her film debut in The Red Shoes. In
later life she sometimes declared that she had been ill-advised to take the
part, feeling that it had lost her the interest of the professional ballet
world. At other times, though, she said that she much preferred to be out of
ballet and enjoying family life: "I used to feel that there was so much more in
life than dancing - so much ordinary living to do."

It is possible, of course, that she forgot that it was through
the film that she captured the heart of Ludovic Kennedy, who was persuaded to
see it by his mother, even though he had no interest in ballet. As he recalled,
"here was this apparition with the reddest of red hair, a figure like an
hour-glass, blue-green eyes the size of saucers, the prettiest of noses and a
most pleasing voice. And as if that weren't enough, she danced with a grace and
lightness that were breathtaking; and her death under the wheels of a train in
Monte Carlo station was almost more than one could bear."

Ludovic Kennedy fell deeply in love. By good fortune, some time
later he was given two complimentary tickets to the Sadler's Wells-Old Vic Ball.
When he arrived he found that Moira Shearer and Ralph Richardson were presenting
the prizes. Though they had not been formally introduced, Kennedy eventually
plucked up courage to approach her. "I walked boldly up, gabbled my name and
said, in a rush, 'Would you like to dance?' "

By the time they reached the dance floor, he was beginning to
wish he was anywhere else: "I put one hand in hers and the other round her waist
(Oh, boy!). Then she said, 'before we start, I must tell you something.' What
could it be? 'I don't dance very well.' We set off, and within a step or two it
was clear she couldn't dance for toffee." So began a courtship which ended in
their marriage in 1950.

After their marriage, Moira Shearer danced occasionally at Covent
Garden, toured America with the ballet in 1950 and also appeared with other
companies.

Her last scheduled Covent Garden appearance was as Princess
Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty in 1953. The following year she danced at the
Edinburgh Festival in Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, with Robert Helpmann, and
played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Films still occupied her. She appeared in The Story of Three
Loves in 1953, and was the star of The Man Who Loved Redheads, a Terence
Rattigan comedy, in 1955. She then returned to the stage as an actress and
toured for six months as Sally Bowles (replacing Dorothy Tutin) in Isherwood's I
Am a Camera. After this she joined the Bristol Old Vic for a year and played in
A Man of Distinction at the Edinburgh Festival in 1957.

Moira Shearer was on the BBC's General Advisory Council from 1970
to 1977 and the Scottish Arts Council from 1971 to 1973. She also served as a
director of Border Television. She was, however, vetoed for appointment as BBC
Governor for the Arts by Margaret Thatcher, a decision which Ludovic Kennedy
assumed had been taken for reasons of "petty partisanship" (he had stood as a
candidate for the Liberal Party) and which he could not find it in his heart to
forgive.

During the 1970s she lectured widely. In 1972 she compered the
Eurovision Song Contest in Edinburgh. She was, for a short time in 1973, an
announcer on BBC Radio 3, and was a reader on the BBC's Book at Bedtime. She and
Ludovic Kennedy read Scottish love poems at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975.

In 1977 she played Madame Ranevsky in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard at
the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh and, in 1978, was Judith Bliss in Coward's
Hay Fever.

She made occasional appearances as a ballet dancer in later life
- at Christmas 1967 she returned to the stage at Covent Garden to dance, with
Ashton, the comic tango from his ballet Façade at a gala performance for the
Friends of Covent Garden.

Earlier that year she was the Mother in Gillian Lynne's ballet
about the life of the painter LS Lowry, appearing alongside Christopher Gable as
Lowry.

In later years she became a reviewer of books on ballet and other
theatrical subjects in The Daily Telegraph and wrote biographies of the
choreographer George Balanchine (who had been a great admirer) and the actress
Ellen Terry.

Moira Shearer enjoyed listening to music and watching rugby and
boxing, a sport which she claimed had much in common with the ballet, "though we
never bashed each other quite so much!"

Even in old age, Moira Shearer kept her good looks, youthful
appearance, slight figure and auburn hair. She always looked elegant, despite
the fact that she claimed to be uninterested in fashion.

In later life, she and her husband left Scotland and settled in
Wiltshire.

Ludovic Kennedy survives her with their son and three
daughters.

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