Sir Robert Helpmann OBE 1909-1986

In London Helpmann scored a small role in I Hate Men at the Gate Theatre. Soon after, thanks to Rawlings, he was accepted into the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. Before long he was made a member of the company. Swiftly and sensationally he made his mark, dancing with the leading English ballerina Alicia Markova. He was with the Wells from 1934 to 1950, often in partnership with Margot Fonteyn. Along with the rest of the company he was on a goodwill tour of the Netherlands when the Nazis invaded the country. The dancers’ departure, minus baggage, scenery and costumes, was dramatic and harrowing.

Helpmann’s innate genius for choreography culminated in the extraordinarily influential 1948 film The Red Shoes in which he starred with Moira Shearer. He was also involved in the spectacular screen version of The Tales of Hoffmann in 1953. His other movie credits include One of Our Aircraft is Missing and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. Later he was featured in films as diverse as 55 Days at Peking, The Quiller Memorandum, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Obviously dance could not contain Helpmann’s ambitions. He turned his talents increasingly to drama, appearing with Vivien Leigh in the Old Vic’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1937 (his Oberon was described as ‘eerie and impressive’) and Hamlet in 1944. ‘His very entrance on the stage,’ commented an English writer, ‘evokes the sort of awed silence that used to herald the parting of the curtains at the appearance of Sir Henry Irving.’ And revered Sunday Times critic James Agate hailed ‘acting on androgynous plane of pure poetry, as indeed one expected from an artist in the school of Nijinsky.’

In 1947, with Michael Benthall, Helpmann became artistic director at the Duchess Theatre, appearing there in The White Devil and He Who Gets Slapped. In 1948 he joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, playing at Stratford-on-Avon as King John, Hamlet and Shylock. In 1955 he led the Old Vic’s tour of Australia, appearing with Katharine Hepburn in The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice. The press welcomed Helpmann’s homecoming with a mixture of admiration and suspicion: admiration for his obvious achievements, and suspicion of his extrovert flamboyance. 

The middle aged enfant terrible toured Australia again in 1958 in the Noël Coward comedy Nude with Violin. He later played in a television adaptation for the BBC.

In the 1950s and 1960s Helpmann worked extensively as a director. His diverse credits include the ballet Swan Lake (for Margot Fonteyn), the operas Madama Butterfly, La Bohème and Le Coq D’Or, the musicals Golden City, After the Ball, Finian’s Rainbow and Camelot, (with designs by the young John Truscott), the pantomime Aladdin, the drama Murder in the Cathedral and many of Shakespeare’s plays. He and Vivien Leigh led the Old Vic world tour of 1961 in a repertory consisting of The Lady of the Camellias, Twelfth Night and Christopher Fry’stranslation of Jean Giraudoux’s Duel of Angels.