Gillian Lynne, choreographer, director, dancer
Born February 20 1926; died July 1 2018
Gillian Lynne, who has died aged 92, was a key player
in the rise of high-end musical theatre in the UK during the 1980s. As the
choreographer and associate director of Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s phenomenally
successful 1981, Lynne was an equal creative force with director Trevor Nunn.
Lynne’s slinky ensemble routines brought T.S. Eliot’s
parade of back-alley felines from his volume of poems, Old Possum’s Book of
Practical Cats, to pulsating life in a way that has defined every production since.
The original London production ran for eighteen years, and at one point was the
longest running show on Broadway. Cats made Lynne a millionaire, and she went
on to work with Lloyd Webber as choreographer on The Phantom of the Opera (1986)
and Aspects of Love (1990).
Cats may have been one pinnacle of Lynne’s long and
flamboyant career, but she had long been the mainstream theatre world’s leading
choreographer of choice. Her fusion of classical ballet with cabaret and jazz
moves saw her crossover from the Royal Ballet to working with Frank Zappa and
The Muppets, with all of her work powered by an innate sensuality that in Cats blossomed
into something spectacular.
Gillian Barbara Pyrke was born in Bromley, Kent to her father Leslie and
her mother, Barbara. Gillian was destined for her future career from an early
age when, aged eight, her mother took her to a doctor, concerned about her
daughter’s level of hyper-activity that had earned her the affectionate name of
Wriggle-Bottom. The doctor put on some music and asked her mother to leave the
room with him, where they observed her through the glass breaking into a
spontaneous dance routine. There was nothing wrong with her, the doctor said,
she was a natural dancer and must take lessons.
When Gillian
was thirteen, her mother died in a car crash, and she ran away from home. After
she was found, her father read about the Cone Ripman School, now the Arts
Educational, and Gillian won a scholarship. She acquired her new surname aged
fifteen, when dancing with a company called the Ballet Guild, whose director
billed her as Gillian Lynne in the programme. The name stuck, and by the time
she was sixteen she was dancing the Swan Queen at the People’s Palace in Mile
End.
Lynne joined
Sadler’s Wells alongside Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer, and between 1946 and
1951 was a principal at the Royal Ballet. After being passed over for a role,
Lynne took a significant sideways turn when she became star dancer at the much
more showbizzy London Palladium.
In 1953 she
appeared opposite Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae, choreographing her
own dance routine. After being a TV and stage regular over the next decade in
musicals, pantomime and revue, Lynne’s breakthrough as a choreographer came in
Edinburgh with Collages (1963), an expressive mash-up of classical and jazz
dance styles she conceived, directed and starred in supported by a Dudley Moore
soundtrack. Collages was spotted by Broadway producer David Merrick, who took
Lynne to New York to stage the numbers for The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd (1965), a musical
collaboration between Leslie Bricuse and Anthony Newley.
By that time,
Lynne had choreographed the musical numbers for three films, Wonderful Life
(1964), Every Day’s A Holiday (1964) and Three Hats for Lisa (1965), vehicles
respectively for pop stars Cliff Richard, John Leyton and Joe Brown. Lynne
later worked on Half a Sixpence (1967) with Tommy Steele and the film of Wolf
Mankowitz’s Charles Dickens-based musical, Pickwick (1969), with Harry Secombe.
On television
Lynne was choreographer on The Val Doonican Show (1970), a cosy contrast to her
tenure on Frank Zappa’s crazed feature, 200 Motels (1971). Later films included
The Man of La Mancha (1972), and Yentl (1983) with Barbra Streisand. Lynne’s
ability to move between worlds also saw her become one of two choreographers on
Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show (1976-80).
The roots of
Lynne’s involvement in Cats date back to 1973, when she struck up a friendship
with producer Cameron Mackintosh while working on The Card, a West End vehicle
for Jim Dale. It was Mackintosh who introduced her to Lloyd Webber after the
composer had seen her work in Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company productions of The
Comedy of Errors (1976) and Once in a Lifetime (1979).
Cats’ bold
sung-through narrative led by Lynne’s well-drilled choreography became a sensation,
and ran in the West End for 8,949 performances, winning Lynne an Olivier Award.
On Broadway, where Lynne was nominated for a Tony, the show ran for 7,485
performances. Lynne went on to oversee more than a dozen productions across the
world, most recently for the 2014 West End revival.
“It’s like my
child,” Lynne told the Herald in a 2016 interview, in which she put the success
of the show down to the three key elements of “Sensuality, sensitivity and
sexuality.”
Aside from her
other collaborations with Lloyd Webber, Lynne won a Bafta for her direction and
choreography of the L.S. Lowry-based TV ballet, A Simple Man (1987), and a year
later created a stage version for Northern Ballet, which was revived in 2009. She
also worked with the Bolshoi in 1998, and in 2002 choreographed the stage
version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the West End and Broadway.
In 2014, with
Birmingham Royal Ballet she presented a new version of Robert Helpmann’s
Miracle in the Gorbals, a show she had been in the cast when it premiered
seventy years earlier.
Lynne’s first
marriage, to Patrick Back, ended in divorce. In 1980, she married actor Peter Land,
and nearly turned down Cats because of it.
“That’s why
the show’s so sexy,” Lynne told the Herald, “because there’s all of our sex in
it.”
In 1997, she
was appointed CBE for services to dance and in 2014 she was made a dame. A memoir,
A Dancer in Wartime, was published in 2011. Never one
to let up, in 2014 she even released an exercise DVD, Longevity Through
Exercise.
Last month, Lloyd Webber renamed his New London
theatre, where Cats had first been performed, as the Gillian Lynne. With Lynne
wheeled in on a golden throne surrounded by dancers dressed as characters from
the show, it was a fitting entrance onto the stage of the first West End
theatre to be named after a woman.
“I think it’s good that Cats unites people in the way
that it does,” Lynne told the Herald, “and I think it might be useful in that
way, even though people don’t realise it. It’s uninhibited in every way, and is
so different from life, and yet, it is life.”
Gillian Lynne is survived by her husband, Peter Land.
The Herald, July 5th 2018
ends
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