Celebrating The Centenary of Dame Gillian Lynne

On the 100th anniversary of her birthday, we explore the creative life of the late, great dancer, choreographer, director and human dynamo, Dame Gillian Lynne.

It’s fitting that Gillian Lynne is the first non-royal woman to have had a West End theatre named after her, since she has unquestionably earned the status of theatrical royalty. Gillian didn’t just create landmark choreography for two of the longest-running musicals of all time – Cats and Phantom of the Opera – she fused ballet with jazz and mime to introduce a whole new dance vocabulary that changed the face of musical theatre.

Nicknamed ‘wriggle bottom’ at home, it was Gillian’s frenetic energy that first pushed her into the world of dance. Worried about her eight-year old daughter’s hyperactivity, Gillian’s mother, Barbara, took her to the family GP who quickly made a very astute diagnosis. After putting on the radio, he and Barbara stepped out of the room whereupon Gillian started leaping around and jumping off the furniture. It confirmed what the doctor had immediately suspected: Gillian was a born dancer. ‘You must take her immediately to dance class,’ he told her bewildered mother.  

The very next day, Gillian attended Miss Madeleine Sharp’s dance class at the Bell Hotel in Bromley, where future ballet luminary and lifelong friend Beryl Grey was also a pupil. Finally, the fledgling dancer felt that she’d ‘come home’. In her autobiography A Dancer in Wartime, Gillian describes the joy of becoming part of the group: ‘I seemed to have leapt over a bubbling stream and landed on the bank of a new and undiscovered country.’

‘It was Cats that brought Gillian international acclaim and resulted in the organisers of the Olivier Awards having to create a special category to recognise her contribution to the show’

‘I felt extremely lucky to be dancing with Moira [Shearer], but was worried it might look like Beauty and the Beast, she was so very beautiful to look at. What saved me was my line and my jump. And the face? Oh, dear, well it just got by!’ – Gillian Lynne

Throughout the Madeleine Sharp years and following Gillian’s win of a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dancing at the age of ten, Barbara was her daughter’s greatest cheerleader. But a couple of months before the start of World War II, tragedy struck when Barbara and three of her friends were killed in a car accident. This devastating loss at the age of thirteen had a profound effect on Gillian and her dancing career. ‘She was my best friend, my protector,’ Gillian told The Guardian in 2011. ‘We had such fun together. She taught me so much too: she taught me discipline, real discipline. I’ve always been quite hard to work for, because I expect so much discipline.’

This determination to honour her mother’s belief in her propelled Gillian through her years at the Royal Academy of Dancing and on to Sadler’s Wells Ballet (which later became the Royal Ballet). Under the tutelage of the legendary Ninette de Valois, Gillian worked alongside dancers Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann, and originated roles in many of Frederick Ashton’s works. Characteristically self-deprecating about her own appearance, Gillian describes the experience of performing with Shearer: ‘I felt extremely lucky to be dancing with Moira, but was worried it might look like Beauty and the Beast, she was so very beautiful to look at. What saved me was my line and my jump. And the face? Oh, dear, well it just got by!’ During those wartime years, avoiding the German bombardment and dealing with the challenges of rationing (Gillian recalls bringing in one New Year with a mouthful of Andrews Liver Salts!) was tough, but her drive remained constant. In her book, Gillian recalls spending hours with her feet trapped under a chest of drawers so they were forced to point better, and one of her most treasured memories was of building up the stamina required for Ashton’s Symphonic Variations: ‘After the first run-through, the dancers lay on the floor panting with exhaustion and when they stood up, six wet outlines remained.’ The tougher the challenge, the more she embraced it.

In 1951, Gillian left Covent Garden to take up the role of principal dancer in Peep Show – the first of a very successful run of shows at The London Palladium. ‘That whole thing was an absolutely amazing new feel to life,’ Gillian told the SDC Journal in 2016. ‘I began to smell other bits of theatre other than ballet.’ It was this Palladium run that caught the eye of Warner Brothers casting director John Redway, resulting in a role opposite Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae, for which Gillian also did the choreography (‘I had a fling with Errol,’ she later confided, ‘but so did everyone.’). Collages – her second collaboration with Dudley Moore – saw her on triple-duty as creator, director and star, and brought her to the attention of Broadway producer David Merrick. Her entrée to the Great White Way followed with The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd in 1965.

Countless West End musical credits followed, including Pickwick, Cameron Mackintosh’s first revival of My Fair Lady, The Matchgirls and Jeeves Takes Charge, as well as various RSC productions and film projects. But it was Cats that brought Gillian international acclaim and resulted in the organisers of the Olivier Awards having to create a special category (Outstanding Achievement in a Musical) to recognise her contribution to the show. Gillian’s choreography built a bridge between the worlds of ballet and musical theatre – and the period in the 1950s when she studied mime with Jacques Lecoq in Paris also helped. ‘Thanks to him, I can make my body go into any character. It’s become instinctive, how to translate your imagination into your limbs, with no holds barred, no thinking, “Oh, I can’t do that.”’ In fact, Gillian’s mantra was: never say no to anything! And it was her commitment to occupying a character that became part of her signature style. ‘My choreography always has acting in it,’ she told the SDC Journal. ‘It’s never just a beautiful line, 40 pirouettes, a great arabesque, a leap across the stage. It’s always, “What is their soul saying, what is their body saying, how is their mind reacting to the music?”’ A self-confessed hard taskmaster, she also believed that bonding with her dancers was important. ‘You have to feel their pulse as well as yours. You have to feel who they are and get to love them. Love is important.’ Love was also important in Gillian’s private life, and she partly attributed her youthful outlook to her beloved husband Peter Land, who was 27 years her junior. ‘I met Peter on the first day of rehearsals for My Fair Lady, which I was staging for Cameron Mackintosh. He was the most beautiful man I have ever seen. We took one look at each other and that was it.’ The couple married in 1980 and were together until Gillian’s death in 2018.

Gillian’s dedication to her craft took its toll on her body but, even with a fused ankle and two metal hips, she was still throwing herself into a 40-minute workout every morning well into her eighties. She did, however, acknowledge that trips through airport security could be interesting (‘I sound bells all over the place.’). Her kinetic personality clearly affected her driving, too – as Andrew Lloyd Webber can attest. In his book Unmasked, he recalls being offered a lift in her sporty two-seater and discovering his friend’s need for speed: ‘Only once in a Ferrari driven by Rowan Atkinson with Kiri Te Kanawa as a fellow passenger have I felt so terrified. Gillie drove like a fiend on a route that embraced parts of London few had seen, so I wasn’t the coolest cucumber when we screeched to a halt outside the Cottesloe stage door.’ While working on her autobiography, Gillian was asked by a journalist for its title. ‘Nipples Firing,’ came the answer. ‘Because that’s what I always yell at my actors. The first thing that enters space is this [inflates chest] and they have to be firing with energy, have to be something that lifts the audience up.’ Without doubt, Gillian was firing with energy until the very end – and probably beyond. Asked by the SDC Journal what she would like to hear God say to her when she arrived at the Pearly Gates, Gillian replied: ‘Go back and try again.