The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Before the American tour, an injury during the first night of Ashton’s Don Juan had kept her from the stage for several months and prevented her from dancing the premiere of his first three-act ballet, Cinderella. When she took over the role later, however, she made it peculiarly her own, showing new qualities of humour and romance.

  Fonteyn’s career was subsequently interrupted more than once by serious injury or illness, setbacks that might have precipitated early retirement in other dancers. Each time, however, she returned apparently stronger than before, and she went on dancing long past the age when a dancer’s powers usually decline. In Fonteyn’s case the physical loss was compensated by continually developing expressiveness and artistic maturity. The initial impetus to extending her career came, however, when, in her early forties, she first danced with Rudolf Nureyev in 1962. He was, as she remarked, young enough to be her son, but there was such immediate rapport between them, such a chemistry between them on stage and such unanimity of purpose in their preparation that they became a partnership of uniquely satisfying quality. Both learned much from the other, enriching their performances with other partners as well as their joint appearances.

  Dame Margot Fonteyn in 1975

  Fonteyn’s long career on stage was made easier because her performances had never depended primarily on virtuosity, although in fact her technique was stronger than was often said. It was she who introduced the long-sustained balances now expected of Aurora in the Rose Adagio; and when younger dancers took over some of her created roles they revealed unexpected difficulties, probably for lack of her gift of phrasing steps to the music. It can be said that Fonteyn never lacked the technique needed for any role she was cast in.

  These covered a wide range. Among the many leading parts created for her with the Royal Ballet were Scènes de ballet, Daphnis and Chloë, Tiresias, Sylvia, Homage to the Queen, La Péri, Birthday Offering and Marguerite and Armand, all by Ashton; de Valois’s Don Quixote, Helpmann’s Hamlet, Petit’s Paradise Lost and Pelléas et Mélisande. As guest elsewhere, John Cranko created Poème de l’extase for her in Stuttgart, Martha Graham mounted Lucifer for Nureyev and her, and Peter Darrell presented her as a Beardsley seductress in Scarlet Pastorale with the Scottish Ballet. She was (against the choreographer’s wish but at the insistence of the Royal Ballet’s American impresario Sol Hurok) the first Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s production, and danced also in revivals of Massine’s Three Cornered Hat with the choreographer, Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial and Night Shadow, Fokine’s Firebird and Petrushka, and Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane among others, also Nureyev’s productions of the Corsair pas de deux, La Bayadère, Raymonda and the Grand Pas from Paquita.

  With the Royal Ballet, Fonteyn occupied a position of complete supremacy. It has sometimes been said that her presence held back the advancement of other dancers, but there was never any among her contemporaries or juniors to equal her. By 1959 the demand for seats when she appeared was such that special prices were charged, and in that same year she began to be billed as a guest artist so that she should be free to accept more of the engagements she was offered all over the world. Nevertheless the Royal Ballet remained her base until after Ashton’s retirement in 1970, although she also danced with more than 30 other companies and specially assembled groups.

  She continued dancing until after her sixtieth birthday, which was marked by Covent Garden with a special gala including a Salut d’amour by Ashton which they danced together. Even after that she took on a new role as the leading nymph in Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune during Nureyev’s 1979 summer season, and was persuaded by him to dance also two final performances of Le Spectre de la Rose. Occasionally thereafter she appeared on special occasions but only in roles that required no dancing.

  In 1955 Fonteyn married Dr Roberto de Arias, a sweetheart of her girlhood who had meanwhile married and had a family before re-entering her life. Immediately after their wedding he was appointed Panamanian ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Fonteyn managed to combine the duties of an ambassador’s wife with her already demanding career, and when her husband fell from political favour she supported his attempts to regain power in his own country. This led at one point to her arrest. She also found herself in police custody once after attending a party in the hippie district of Los Angeles. The dignity with which she endured such incidents showed one aspect of her character. Another was revealed by the devotion with which she personally nursed her husband for 25 years until his death after he had been shot and crippled by an associate with a personal grudge.

  Two careers, as ballerina and as politician’s wife, would have been enough for most women, but Fonteyn also became in 1954 president of the Royal Academy of Dancing and committed herself wholeheartedly to its well being.

  In later years, Fonteyn developed a great interest in her husband’s farm in Panama, and she continued to live there even after his death with few creature comforts because she had spent most of her money on caring for her husband and then incurred considerable costs having treatment in Texas when she developed cancer.

  In spite of her illness she undertook some teaching and coaching, and also visited England each year for the Assembly of the RAD and for the degree ceremony at Durham University, which had elected her chancellor. She wrote and introduced a six-part television series The Magic of Dance. This was also the subject of one of several books she wrote; they included an autobiography, a study of Pavlova, and an account of A Dancer’s World.

  Fonteyn was created CBE in 1951 and DBE in 1956. She had honorary degrees from many universities and the Order of the Finnish Lion. A greater tribute however was the affection she inspired all over the world. The purity and musicality of her work won admiration; its liveliness and dedication inspired much warmer and deeper feelings, manifested in a special tribute performance at Covent Garden last May for which Nureyev danced and Plácido Domingo sang.

  Dame Margot Fonteyn, DBE, ballerina, was born on May 18, 1919. She died on February 21, 1991, aged 71

  EILEEN JOYCE

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  AUSTRALIAN-BORN CONCERT PIANIST WHO PROGRESSED FROM PLAYING A BEER-STAINED PUB PIANO TO A SENSATIONAL PROMS DEBUT

  MARCH 29, 1991

  Because in mid-career she opted for an emphasis on personal popularity, Eileen Joyce’s undoubted musicality and virtuosity were for a while overlooked. She was a player of extraordinary skill, at home in Mozart as in Shostakovich and encompassing Chopin, Liszt, Grieg and Rachmaninov along the way, as her many excellent records, recently reissued, reveal. These capabilities had been on display before the war, during which her good looks and charm, allied to her pianistic flair, brought her playing to the attention of a much broader section of the public than generally listened to classical music at that time. At this period she revelled in playing three concertos in a programme, often appearing in a different dress for each. Their glamour attracted some comment at a time when it was unexpected, but she said: “Changing fills in the intervals when I might be biting my nails with nervousness. Would the critics prefer that I should wear black?” She played the piano for Ann Todd in the film The Seventh Veil and made a film of an autobiographical nature called Wherever She Goes.

  Joyce was born of immigrant parents of Spanish and Irish descent. Her mother told her she was born in a tent; her father was a labourer and she was called “Ragged Eilie”. They were terribly poor and she first played falteringly on a beer-stained piano from a local pub that was trundled round to her father’s house. She was educated at a convent school sitting in the back row reserved for the non-paying pupils. She became well known in Boulder City for her playing and money was collected so that she could go to a larger convent school at Perth.

  Her talents were spotted first by the composer Percy Grainger and then by the pianist Backhaus who was touring Australia. They urged that she be sent abroad to study. Grainger was helpful in raising funds so that she could go to the conservatoire in Leipzig. Her teachers there were Max P
auer and the fearfully strict Robert Teichmüller who was responsible for giving her a magnificent technique. After three years at Leipzig she moved to London and continued her studies with Tobias Matthay and Adelina de Lara. Finally she went to work with Schnabel in Berlin.

  With such a comprehensive training she astonished the conductor Albert Coates at an audition in 1930. He recommended her to Sir Henry Wood with whom she made a sensational debut that year, playing a Prokofiev concerto. She quickly established an appreciable reputation in recitals and concertos and began a long series of recordings for Parlophone. Her repertoire eventually consisted of more than 70 works, some of which, such as the John Ireland Concerto, were written especially for her.

  After her war-time fame she resumed a fairly normal concert career touring all over the world. She could be outspoken publicly, once complaining, in 1957, that there was not one grand piano available for public recitals in three county towns — Winchester, Exeter and Gloucester, home of the Three Choirs Festival. At a musical competition in Geneva she walked out on her fellow judges, complaining of outside influences being brought to bear on the jury. At the Proms in 1958 she gave the first performance in England of Shostakovich’s piano concerto, Opus 101.

  Her career was hard work. Some of her strong stubby fingers were in 1958 taped to prevent cuts and others had corns. Her hands became weary, her back strained and Harley Street became a second home. Towards the end she was spending more on doctors’ bills than she was earning on the concert platform.

  In the early 1960s she retired precipitately although in 1967 she was persuaded to reappear to play Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto, one of her greatest successes, once more. She was made an honorary Doctor of Music at Cambridge in 1970 and appointed CMG in 1981. Her retirement was spent in Kent, near Chartwell, where she would often entertain friends with her playing.

  She was married twice and had a son by her first husband.

  Eileen Joyce, CMG, concert pianist, was born on November 21, 1912. She died on March 25, 1991, aged 78

  Editor’s note: Other authorities claim January 1, 1908, or November 21, 1910, as Eileen Joyce’s birthdate.

  DAME PEGGY ASHCROFT

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  BOLD AND VERSATILE FIRST LADY OF THE ENGLISH STAGE, FOR WHOM THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS A TYPICAL ROLE

  JUNE 15, 1991

  Since the death of Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft had held the undisputed place of first lady of the English stage. Her performances were among the Shakespearian peaks of the past 60 years, but she is no less vividly remembered for her work in the modern repertory and for the television and film roles that won her a huge audience during her final decade. She also had a larger vision of the theatre than can be conveyed by summarising her acting career.

  From her girlhood reading of Stanislavsky she was, from the start, an actress in search of a company. She briefly glimpsed her goal during the 1930s and finally achieved it after the war with the foundation of the English Stage Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. To each she gave wholehearted support at a crucial time in its fortunes. What they gained from her was not only the services of a great classical star but a moral force which was as visible in her performances as it was in her personal life. She was seen as an embodiment of British integrity, a factor that was turned against her by such critics as James Agate and Kenneth Tynan who persisted in regarding her as a class-bound home counties lady who had no business to be essaying Cleopatra or the Duchess of Malfi. In fact these parts were fully within her range and if one point emerges from the roll-call of her most successful performances it is that there was no such thing as a typical Ashcroft role.

  What did set her apart from actors who simply disappear into whatever they are playing was the presence of a central moral intelligence authorising whatever imaginative leap the character demanded. When she became the first establishment actress to play Brecht, or when she first hurled a four-letter word at a West End audience, she left a landmark behind. To recount her life is to tell the story of the English theatrical renaissance.

  Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft was born in Croydon, the second child of a land-agent father and a Danish-German mother herself an amateur actress who had taken lessons from the poetic speech pioneer Elsie Fogerty, at whose Central School of Speech and Drama the 16-year-old Peggy Ashcroft enrolled on leaving Woodford School. “I learned very little about acting there,” she later declared, being as resistant as her fellow student Laurence Olivier to the school’s stress on the Voice Beautiful. Her theatrical education began with her reading of Stanislavsky’s My Life in Art and her discovery of his émigré compatriot Theodore Komisarjevsky who was then revolutionising the English stage from his tiny theatre in Barnes. She made her professional debut in 1926, playing opposite Ralph Richardson in a Birmingham Repertory revival of Barrie’s Dear Brutus after which except for illness or personal choice she was seldom out of work.

  In the early years, like any newcomer, she took what was going, though even then she was more at home in London’s adventurous little theatres than in the commercial machine. Critics of the time were struck by her freedom from any kind of stage trickery and by the transparent honesty which remained one of her sovereign qualities. One conspicuous early event was her 1930 performance of Desdemona to Paul Robeson’s Othello, which also marked her political awakening (a star in the Savoy Theatre, Robeson was unwelcome upstairs in the hotel). The turning point came not on the professional stage but in the 1932 OUDS production of Romeo and Juliet which brought her into contact with undergraduate George Devine and his guest director, John Gielgud, her two closest allies over the next 25 years.

  The alliance was delayed by her marriage to Komisarjevsky and a season with the Old Vic where she piled up a succession of Shakespearian leads at breakneck speed under the direction of Harcourt Williams. By then a member of the unofficial “family” that grew up in the Motleys’ Studio (Gielgud’s designers), hatching theatrical revolution over endless cups of tea, she came into her own as Gielgud’s leading actress when he embarked on the untried adventure of setting up a classical company in the West End. Beginning as Juliet in the legendary 1935 New Theatre production, she returned for Gielgud’s subsequent seasons at the Queen’s and the Haymarket, playing Nina in Komisarjevsky’s The Seagull, Irina in Michel Saint-Denis’s Three Sisters, and the Duchess of Malfi (then a controversial novelty) for George Rylands: productions that left an indelible mark on theatrical memory. True to her company loyalties, she also joined in Saint-Denis’s ill-fated 1938 Phoenix season before the “family” was dispersed by the war.

  Had Gielgud’s companies not kept breaking up, she would gladly have stayed inside them. As it was, she rebuilt her career at the Stratford Memorial Theatre (under Anthony Quayle) and in the West End. She often undertook parts with severe misgivings but then turned them to triumph: as with the alcoholic wife in Robert Morley’s Edward, My Son, the victim-turned-avenger in The Heiress, and (originally her prime bête noire) the suicidal Hester Collyer in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea.

  The pattern of her career underwent its second great change in the 1950s with the dawning of the age of subsidy. First she resumed her alliance with Devine in the 1954 Hedda Gabler and when Devine launched the English Stage Company two years later, Ashcroft at the height of her commercial success in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden forsook the Haymarket for the wilderness of Sloane Square to double as Shen TeShui Ta in his production of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. The ESC, however, did not maintain a permanent troupe so, although she subsequently joined Devine in revivals of Chekhov and Ibsen, her main allegiance went to Peter Hall’s newly-formed Royal Shakespeare Company. She began in 1960 by reclaiming two shrews, Kate and Paulina, in The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale, before going on, in 1963-64, to play Margaret of Anjou in The Wars of the Roses, in which (then in her late fifties) she began as a young girl and aged into a demonic septuagenarian. This was a woman, Philip Hope-Wallace wrote, “ke
pt alive by sheer passion of inner hate”. With Hall, she also became an incomparable advocate of Pinter, Albee, and (when Hall moved on to the National Theatre) Beckett. Just as she had championed the young Peter Hall at the start of the RSC, so she supported his younger successor, Trevor Nunn, with whom she achieved her crowning stage performance as the Countess of Roussillon in the 1981 All’s Well That Ends Well, in which she lent something Chekhovian to Shakespearian comedy.

  Nunn once made the point that actors achieve greatness only in old age when “life has tested them and they’ve come through.” This was clearly true of Ashcroft, both on stage and in her final creative breakthrough on film. Three times married, CND supporter, and veteran campaigner against social injustice (so much so that when she was created DBE in 1956 Hugh Beaumont nicknamed her “the Red Dame”), she was not short of living experience. In her youth an epitome of the intelligent ingénue, in middle age a radical actress exploring the desperation of women of violently contrasted classes and cultures, she finally took on a quality in which acting became wisdom. Nunn again: “You simply lose yourself in the largeness of her spirit.”

  In her film and television work she was able to take the spectator straight to the heart of character. One of her most remarkable small screen roles was Barbie Batchelor in Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1984), where she showed the development of character from robust decency to ferocious despair with minimal reliance on external effects. This performance won her a BAFTA award. She had acted in films from The Wandering Jew of 1933 and had a role in Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps of 1935. But she picked her film parts. She had a success as the Mother Superior in The Nun’s Story (1958) and won an Oscar as the best supporting actress for her portrayal of Mrs Moore in David Lean’s film version of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1984). At 81, in 1989, she shared the best actress award, the Coppa Volpi Prize, with Geraldine James at the Venice Film Festival for her performance in Sir Peter Hall’s film She’s Been Away. It was a remarkable achievement for an actress who had made her debut 60 years before. Her most recent public appearance was at the Olivier Awards in London in April when she was given a special award to mark her life’s service to the theatre.