MOI-YO’S MAGIC LIFE COMES TO AN END
AUSTRALIA’S “most beautiful woman”, illusionist Moi-Yo Miller, has died aged 104.
The Geelong-born beauty queen, real name Mona Loretta Miller, was the leading lady of the world’s biggest and best touring show of the 1930s and ’40s.
She performed everywhere from London and New York to Cairo and Moscow as part of Dante the Magician’s show.
She was shot, crushed, bent, twisted, folded, levitated, evaporated, reconstituted and sawn in half some 11,000 times in her career as a magician’s assistant.
Miller, one of four kids, lived on Skene St, Newtown, and later in Lonsdale St, South Geelong, with siblings Marnie, Bobbie and Frank. In an interview with gt magazine in 2009 she spoke fondly of memories from her school days at St Mary’s, swimming in the sea baths at Eastern Beach, visiting Johnstone Park and exploring the Barwon River.
Hand-picked by Dante, aka Harry Jansen, in 1933 while still in her teens, Miller toured and lived overseas for decades, her fame and fortune all but unknown home in Australia.
She rubbed shoulders with Hollywood’s golden era stars, had a narrow escape from Nazi Germany, and as recently as 2008 featured front and centre in the acclaimed magician assistants movie Women in Boxes.
The film’s producer/ director Harry Pallenberg said: “Every single person we interviewed — both man and woman, magician or assistant, historian or magic fan — saw Moi-Yo as the pinnacle of the art. She brought a style and sophistication to the act, along with her obvious beauty. She was more than an assistant, she was a partner.’’
In 2014 Miller celebrated her 100th birthday, surrounded by about 50 family and friends at her nursing home in Prahan.
Miller’s was the face of a public art mural by local artist Michael Cassar painted in June 2016 on the corner of James St and Minns Lane.