Dame Gillian Lynne, who has died aged 92, was a figure of extraordinary versatility and longevity in the dance world, the choreographer of such world-renowned musicals as Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, the creator of scores of stage shows and television dance films, and also a former Royal Ballet ballerina, musical theatre star, and a Hollywood co-star — and lover — of Errol Flynn.
Even as she approached 90, she kept a working pace of ferocious energy, recreating a lost 1940s classical ballet for Birmingham Royal Ballet and co-directing a large new production of Cats in the West End in 2014. She told an interviewer: “It’s only because I’ve been so busy I’ve not had time to die.”
Her CV of shows, roles and awards ran to 10 pages.
Two weeks ago she became the first non-royal woman to have her name on a West End theatre, when the composer of Cats, Lord Lloyd-Webber, renamed the New London Theatre, Drury Lane — the venue for the show’s record-breaking 21-year run — the Gillian Lynne Theatre. Lynne was borne onstage in a golden throne by four bare-chested men, bedecked with pink ostrich feathers.
With her long slim limbs, frequently displayed to great advantage in short dresses and leotards even in her eighties, Lynne insisted that her arrestingly youthful looks were the result of being married to a man 24 years younger than her.
Lynne crossed every borderline in dance, choreographing straight ballets for Western Theatre Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet, creating new television ballet dramas and enjoyed being known in the dance business as the “queen of sexy”.
“I remember saying to the cast of Cats that we wanted it to be the sexiest show ever,” she recalled. “I told them that our aim was to make people jump up from their seats, rush home and leap into bed to make love.”
Yet she also regularly created the dances for the Royal Opera and English National Opera — for Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Parsifal, Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage and Berlioz’s The Trojans, as well as for popular films such as Wonderful Life, Half a Sixpence, Yentl and Man of La Mancha.
Despite two hip replacements (she shared a surgeon with the Queen Mother), she remained able to tuck her feet behind her ears at 88, and produced a fitness DVD to prove it. “Retirement’s the biggest mistake you can make,” she said.
Born Gillian Barbara Pyrke on February 20 1926, the only child of Barbara and Leslie Pyrke, a Bromley house furnisher, she lost her mother in an early tragedy that she said drove her achievements throughout her life. In 1939 her mother and three friends went on a shopping trip and were all killed in a car crash, leaving four families motherless.
The young Gillian had been encouraged in dancing by her mother, but the accident, and wartime evacuation, interrupted her progress. When her father joined the Army she was evacuated to Somerset, but ran away. Her mother’s sister became her guardian back in south London and helped her win a place at the Cone Ripman dance school.
As a teenager she began performing with Molly Lake’s Ballet Guild, and in 1944 danced the leading role in Swan Lake at a gala for the Daily Telegraph’s then ballet critic A V Coton. For the programme, Molly Lake changed the girl’s name to Gillian Lynne.
One of the guests was the founder of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Ninette de Valois, who invited Gillian to join the company. During her seven years with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Gillian collected a quiverful of new leading roles. The American choreographer George Balanchine picked her to double Beryl Grey’s role in Ballet Imperial, and Frederick Ashton cast her, aged 20, in the second night of his 1946 masterpiece Symphonic Variations.
She was frequently cast in dramatic roles such as Myrta, the queen of the supernatural Wilis in Giselle and the Black Queen in de Valois’s Checkmate, and she featured prominently in Robert Helpmann’s ballets Adam Zero and Miracle in the Gorbals. She was also a soloist in the historic Sadler’s Wells Ballet performances of The Sleeping Beauty that reopened the Royal Opera House in 1946, and at the company’s celebrated New York debut in 1949.
On the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s second US tour in 1951 Gillian Lynne went to see the new Broadway production of South Pacific, which “changed my life”. Within two years, aware that she was likely to remain a secondary soloist in classical ballet, she took up the London Palladium’s offer to become its resident star ballerina, performing alongside such household names as Vera Lynn, Terry-Thomas, George Formby and the Billy Cotton Band.
Her salary jumped from pounds 15 to pounds 40 a week, and she turned down de Valois’s request that she return to the ballet: “I had smelled another world, one that I knew I could conquer.” Spotted by a Hollywood scout at the Palladium, in 1952 she was hired by Warner Brothers to play the sultry gipsy dancer Marianna in Errol Flynn’s The Master of Ballantrae, and the two had a brief affair.
In a characteristically unlikely sequence of events, she returned to Covent Garden to dance in the Royal Opera’s Tannhauser and Aida, then starred in Goody Two Shoes in Windsor and Puss In Boots at Coventry’s Empire, supported by Morecambe and Wise and Harry Secombe.
Soon after, she landed the first of many jobs dancing in BBC television productions, then performed live: she performed the Dance of the Seven Veils in Salome, played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and narrated and mimed all nine characters in a 1959 live filming of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. To train for the last, the BBC sent her to Jacques Lecoq’s renowned mime school in France, an experience that she later drew on for Cats.
Gillian Lynne’s first choreography was also for television, Western Theatre Ballet’s jazz-ballet The Owl and the Pussycat, composed by Dudley Moore. Moore next collaborated with her on her first original stage work, an innovative revue of jazz, ballet and words, Collages, for the 1963 Edinburgh Festival, which was so successful that it transferred to the Savoy in London.
In 1973 she and Moore accepted a BBC Two challenge to create a Saturday night live television Soccer Ballet, as a rival attraction for viewers of Match of the Day.
She directed award-winning dance sequences for episodes of The Muppet Show in the late 1970s, and in 1987 created a celebrated BBC television dance film about the life of L S Lowry, A Simple Man, which she adapted for Northern Ballet Theatre to perform in theatres. She also choreographed for her great friend, the skater John Curry, when he essayed a move from ice to the boards in 1978.
However, it was her creation of Cats with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn in 1981 that was Gillian Lynne’s passport to world celebrity. An acrobatic “dance-ical” in cat costumes making a sexy semi-pantomime from T S Eliot’s poems was hardly expected to be a world smash, but it ran for 18 years on Broadway and 21 in the West End. Gillian Lynne would stage dozens of productions around the world till the end of her life, including a new West End staging in 2014-16.
The record-breaking popularity and longevity of Cats were overtaken in 1986 by the next Lloyd Webber musical with Gillian Lynne as musical stager and choreographer, Phantom of the Opera, directed by Hal Prince. Gillian Lynne used her backstage knowledge of the Royal Opera House to bring atmospheric veracity to the Paris Opera of the story, and it became the most financially successful musical ever created, winning Best Musical at both Britain’s 1986 Olivier Awards and New York’s 1988 Tony Awards.
It is still playing in New York, by a long margin the longest-running Broadway show in history. Aspects of Love, Lloyd Webber’s 1989 musical, which once again Trevor Nunn directed and Gillian Lynne choreographed, was less successful. It closed on Broadway after less than a year, losing $8 million (Dh29.38 million), and was described in The New York Times as “perhaps the greatest flop in Broadway history”.
Gillian Lynne directed or choreographed more than 50 shows, including the RSC’s The Comedy of Errors and The Boy Friend (both directed by Nunn), and on Broadway and in the West End Roar of the Greasepaint, Pickwick, My Fair Lady and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She created several original shows for the London Palladium, including Queen of the Cats and Hans Andersen. Among opera productions she directed and choreographed for the Royal Opera and English National Opera were Bluebeard, Parsifal and The Trojans.
As a ballet choreographer she became associated with Northern Ballet Theatre, after the star of A Simple Man, Christopher Gable, became artistic director at the Leeds company. But her later works for the company, Lippizaner and The Brontes, were less successful than the Lowry ballet.
She was a tireless advocate for popular music and jazz dance, and made acclaimed television dance films on the Beatles (The Fool on the Hill for Australian TV) and on Burt Bacharach and Hal David (The Look of Love for the BBC). She enthusiastically joined Twitter when she was 85, but remained strongly sceptical of other modern developments in the dance profession, believing that an old-fashioned work ethic was what trained the best.
Among Gillian Lynne’s many honours were Olivier Awards for the RSC’s The Comedy of Errors (1977) and lifetime achievement (2013), a Bafta for A Simple Man (1987), and the Samuel G Engel TV Award for her BBC drama Le Morte d’Arthur (1985).
In 1997 she was appointed CBE and in 2014 DBE, for services to dance and musical theatre. She published her autobiography, A Dancer in Wartime, in 2011, and was elected vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dance in 2012, receiving its top honour, the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award.
Gillian Lynne’s first marriage to the barrister Patrick St John back in 1948 did not survive her affair with Errol Flynn. In 1980, during auditions for My Fair Lady, which she was directing, a 27-year-old actor, Peter Land, auditioned for the juvenile lead, Freddy Eysnford-Hill. “He was standing there at the bar, and he was drop-dead gorgeous. We just looked at each other,” she recalled. He was exactly half her age when they married in 1980.
Peter Land survives her. There were no children.
