Aside from the qualities I have mentioned, there is also a fine romanticism about her work. Intelligence in a dancer is something that is rare. There are those who argue that it is not necessarily a virtue in a dancer. They could not be more wrong. It is, I think, Moira Shearer’s superior intelligence that gives her, among other things, that power of pitiless self-criticism that is the hallmark of the first-class artist.
Moira Shearer has been as fortunate in her private life as in her professional activities. She lives happily in a lovely London home with her attractive and talented writer-husband, Ludovic Kennedy. During the second Sadler’s Wells American tour, her husband drove across the continent from New York to Los Angeles to join Moira for the California engagement, discovering, by means of a tiny Austin, that there were still a great many of the wide-open spaces left in the land Columbus discovered.
In her charming London flat, with her husband, her books, her pictures, and her music, she carries out one of her most serious ambitions: to be a good mother; for the center of the household is her young daughter, born in midsummer, 1952.
The depth of Moira Shearer’s sincerity I happen to know not only from others, but from personal experience. It is a genuine and real sincerity that applies to every aspect of her life, and not only in art and the theatre.
A loyal colleague, she has a highly developed sense of honor. As Ninette de Valois once remarked to me: “Anything that Moira has ever said or promised is a bond with her, and nothing of a confirming nature in writing is required.”
A splendid artist, ballerina, and film star, it is my profound hope that Moira may meet with the same degree of success in her new venture into the legitimate theatre.
There seems little doubt of this, since I am persuaded that she will make good in anything she undertakes.
BERYL GREY
Another full-fledged ballerina of the company, is Beryl Grey, who alternates all ballerina roles today with Fonteyn, Violetta Elvin, Nadia Nerina and Rowena Jackson. Beryl Grey’s American success was assured on the opening night of the first season at the Metropolitan Opera House, with her gracious and commandingly sympathetic performance of the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty.
In a sense, Grey’s and Shearer’s careers have followed a similar pattern, in that they were both “baby ballerinas.” Born Beryl Groom, at Muswell Hill, in London’s Highgate section, in 1927, the daughter of a government technical expert and his wife, Beryl Grey’s dancing studies began very early in life in Manchester, and at the age of nine, she won a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. In 1941, she joined the company, and so rapid was her growth as an artist that she danced leading roles in some half-dozen of the one-act ballets in the repertoire, in place of Margot Fonteyn who had been taken ill. Even more remarkable is the fact that she danced the full-length Swan Lake in London on her fifteenth birthday.