S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance WorldHurok, Sol
History
S. Hurok Presents; A Memoir of the Dance World
Hurok, Sol
Ballet -- History
Moira Shearer has been as fortunate in her private life as in her
professional activities. She lives happily in a lovely London home with
her attractive and talented writer-husband, Ludovic Kennedy. During the
second Sadler’s Wells American tour, her husband drove across the
continent from New York to Los Angeles to join Moira for the California
engagement, discovering, by means of a tiny Austin, that there were
still a great many of the wide-open spaces left in the land Columbus
discovered.
In her charming London flat, with her husband, her books, her pictures,
and her music, she carries out one of her most serious ambitions: to be
a good mother; for the center of the household is her young daughter,
born in midsummer, 1952.
The depth of Moira Shearer’s sincerity I happen to know not only from
others, but from personal experience. It is a genuine and real sincerity
that applies to every aspect of her life, and not only in art and the
theatre.
A loyal colleague, she has a highly developed sense of honor. As Ninette
de Valois once remarked to me: “Anything that Moira has ever said or
promised is a bond with her, and nothing of a confirming nature in
writing is required.”
A splendid artist, _ballerina_, and film star, it is my profound hope
that Moira may meet with the same degree of success in her new venture
into the legitimate theatre.
There seems little doubt of this, since I am persuaded that she will
make good in anything she undertakes.
_BERYL GREY_
Another full-fledged _ballerina_ of the company, is Beryl Grey, who
alternates all _ballerina_ roles today with Fonteyn, Violetta Elvin,
Nadia Nerina and Rowena Jackson. Beryl Grey’s American success was
assured on the opening night of the first season at the Metropolitan
Opera House, with her gracious and commandingly sympathetic performance
of the Lilac Fairy in _The Sleeping Beauty_.
In a sense, Grey’s and Shearer’s careers have followed a similar
pattern, in that they were both “baby ballerinas.” Born Beryl Groom, at
Muswell Hill, in London’s Highgate section, in 1927, the daughter of a
government technical expert and his wife, Beryl Grey’s dancing studies
began very early in life in Manchester, and at the age of nine, she won
a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. In 1941, she joined
the company, and so rapid was her growth as an artist that she danced
leading roles in some half-dozen of the one-act ballets in the
repertoire, in place of Margot Fonteyn who had been taken ill. Even more
remarkable is the fact that she danced the full-length _Swan Lake_ in
London on her fifteenth birthday.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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