Moira Shearer’s reputation had preceded her across the United States and Canada, as I have pointed out, because of the exhibition of spontaneity, beauty and charm that had been revealed to thousands in the motion picture, _Red Shoes_. There is no denying this film was highly successful. I suppose it can be argued successfully that _Red Shoes_ brought ballet to a new audience, and thus, in that sense, was good for ballet. Whatever it may have been, it was not a true, or good, or honest picture of ballet. I happen to know how Moira Shearer feels about it, and I share her feelings. Although she dislikes to talk or hear very much about _Red Shoes_, and was not very happy with it or about it, she was, I fancy, less disturbed by her role in _The Tales of Hoffman_, with “Freddy” Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, and Leonide Massine. Best of all her film excursions, Moira feels, was her sequence in _My Three Loves_, which Ashton directed for her in Hollywood. Once, on introducing her to one of those characteristic, monumental California salads, her comment was: “My, but it’s delicious; yet it looks like that Technicolor mess I should like to forget.” Shearer feels _Red Shoes_ was rather a sad mess, a complete travesty of the ballet life which it posed as portraying; that it was false and phoney throughout, and that, perhaps, the phoniest thing about it was its alleged glamor. On the other hand, she does not regard the time she spent making it wasted, for, as she says, she was able to sit at the feet of Leonide Massine and watch and learn and observe the concentration with which he worked, the intelligence he brought to every gesture, and the vast ingenuity and originality he applied to everything he did. I happen to know Shearer has no illusions about the film publicity campaign that made her a movie star overnight. She was amused by it, but never taken in, and was hurt only when the crowds mobbed for autographs and Americans hailed her as “_the_ star” of Sadler’s Wells. Cultured and highly intelligent, Moira Shearer is intensely musical, both in life and in the dance. This musicality is particularly apparent in her portrayal of the Princess Aurora in _The Sleeping Beauty_, and in the dual role of Odette-Odile in _Swan Lake_. Again it is markedly noticeable in a quite non-classical work, for of all the dancers I have seen dance the Tango in _Façade_, she is by far the most satiric and brilliant. She is well-nigh indispensable to _Wedding Bouquet_. Aside from the qualities I have mentioned, there is also a fine romanticism about her work. Intelligence in a dancer is something that is rare. There are those who argue that it is not necessarily a virtue in a dancer. They could not be more wrong. It is, I think, Moira Shearer’s superior intelligence that gives her, among other things, that power of pitiless self-criticism that is the hallmark of the first-class artist.