Dancerwhose life was overturned by Vivien Leigh
Tamara Tchinarova, ballerina: b Cetatea Alba, Romania, July 18, 1919; mPeter Finch (diss); 1d; d Malaga, Spain, August 31, 2017, aged 98.
‘Your knees will have to be stretched,’’ was George Balanchine’s warning to Tamara Tchinarova when he plucked the 12-year-old from her ballet class in Paris to dance in the first season of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1932.
Tchinarova and the famous trio of ‘‘baby ballerinas’’, Irina Baronova, Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova, were some of the sprightly young ‘‘Russians who never danced in Russia’’. They brought to western Europe the tradition of Russian ballet exemplified by choreographers such as Balanchine and Mikhail Fokine.
Within four years they were touring Australia, where a critic described how Tchinarova, dancing Action in Leonide Massine’s Les Presages, ‘‘performed strong and difficult movements with a lightness, a freedom, a perfect clearness, which were fascinating to watch’’. Arnold Haskell, the British critic, wrote of Tchinarova: ‘‘With her jet-black hair, olive skin, and the suggestion of immense nervous energy held well in reserve, one can only compare her to some pure-bred Arab horse.’’
Tchinarova returned to Australia in 1938-39, this time with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, but it was a dispiriting tour. Despite being a principal dancer, she found herself pushed into the corps de ballet. ‘‘That hurt,’’ she wrote. ‘‘I was constantly in tears. Protestations were in vain.’’
With Europe descending into war and her Romanian passport not guaranteeing safe passage, she chose to remain. She made a small amount of money as a photo-colourist, while her mother made tutus.
They lived in a tiny flat in Sydney and were required to present their passports to the police each month – although a local policeman with a passion for her ‘‘momma’s borscht’’ visited with flowers each month and stamped their papers.
One wintry night Tchinarova and two colleagues were sent by an unscrupulous agent as ‘‘Covent Garden Ballet’’ to Ballarat, west of Melbourne. ‘‘The theatre was a wooden shack,’’ she recalled. ‘‘One lonely reporter was waiting, curiously wondering how 80 people would fit on the stage ... When he found out there were three of us and a pianist he said he would denounce the fraudulent advertisement in the local paper.’’
The trio found the promoter, aMr Knight, in a nearby pub drinking the proceeds of the 16 tickets that had been sold. The show went on, with the dancers sidestepping the loose planks on the stage.In 1942 Tchinarova was engaged to Fred Breen, an Australian press photographer who joined the air force and died in a raid over Germany. ‘‘I cried for weeks,’’ she wrote.
All that was forgotten in December that year when she was at Redleaf Pool, a beach east of Sydney, dressed in a Tahitian-patterned swimsuit. As she sunbathed Peter Finch, a British actor with a hellraising lifestyle, but doing military service in Australia, dropped his towel next to her and entered the water.
She recalled having seen him in a film the previous evening and mentioned this when he emerged. They became inseparable, with Finch encouraging her to improve her English by reading Winnie the Pooh.
They were married on April 21, 1943, but Finch began bringing home army mates for late-night parties and drinking heavily. Tchinarova, meanwhile, joined a dance company created by Helene Kirsova.
Later she was in Eduardo Borovansky’s troupe in Melbourne, a precursor of today’s Australian Ballet, where she helped to recreate the works of the Ballets Russes, including Le Carnaval and Scheherazade.
In 1948 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, touring Australia, saw Finch in Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire and were impressed. Afterwards Olivier told Finch to look him up in London. That was enough to persuade the actor, despairing of the provincial nature of Australian theatre, to move.
Tamara, who had been dancing professionally for almost two decades, did not hesitate. ‘‘Let’s go, Peter,’’ she said. They arrived in Britain three months later, where Finch was put on contract by Olivier at the Old Vic and their daughter, Anita, was born. Leigh, who had won an Oscar for Gone with the Wind, was her godmother.
Things soon started to go awry. One snowy night Leigh turned up at the family’s Dolphin Square flat at 2am wearing a see-through dress beneath her mink coat. She demanded that Finch read a script for Elephant Walk, which she was about to star in. Olivier had let her down and she wanted Finch to take his role. Filming would begin shortly in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Finch agreed, although Leigh’s part was eventually taken by Elizabeth Taylor.
Afterwards Finch flew to Hollywood with Leigh. They were joined by Tchinarova and Anita at the mansion where the cast were staying. Tchinarova recalled how on her first night there ‘‘Peter and I made passionate love ... then settled, limbs entwined, for the night’’; suddenly the bedroom door flew open ‘‘and a demented-looking Vivien Leigh, her robe thrown open to display her naked body, rushed to our bed’’.
For a while the three lived together, but eventually Tchinarova could no longer tolerate Leigh’s bipolar disorder and her husband’s infidelity and left. For Tchinarova it was too late to resume her dancing career.
She was born Tamara Yevsevievna Rekemchuk in Cetatea Alba, in an area known as Bessarabia, then in Romania and now in Ukraine. Her father, Evseny Rekemchuk, was a decorated Russian army captain, while her mother, Anna, served with the Red Cross on the Turkish front during World War II.
Tamara recalled childhood summers at her grandfather’s dacha, helping to harvest the vineyards, although in 1940 he and his wife would be bayoneted by occupying Soviet troops.
In 1926 her father, now a journalist, travelled to Paris for work. The family soon joined him and for a time Tamara was placed in a convent school in Versailles. Later she was taken to see Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes perform Chopiniana and was soon begging for dancing lessons.
After a time Rekemchuk returned to the Soviet Union ‘‘to help build a new society there’’. She never saw him again and began to use her mother’s name. It transpired that he had been killed on Stalin’s orders in 1937, although in 2004 Tchinarova learned that he had remarried and she had a septuagenarian stepbrother. By age 10 she was studying with Olga Preobrajenska, a former member of the Russian Imperial Ballet.
A year later she danced in Algeria and Morocco, billed as ‘‘la plus petite danseuse du monde’’, and in 1932 returned to her homeland, where the Roma taught her the gypsy dances that she would incorporate into ballets such as Petrushka.
She joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, appearing on the London stage in 1933 and in New York the next year, where she met Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. In Los Angeles the audience included Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich.
While in the US she had a romance with Yurek Lazovsky, a fellow dancer, but he almost lost his life when Alexis Koslov, another dancer with strong feelings for Tchinarova, produced a gun in a fit of jealousy.
After her divorce Tchinarova, often known as Tamara Finch, had various lovers, but she never remarried. Back in London she had cosmetic surgery to reduce the size of her nose, which had been cruelly ridiculed in public by Leigh, and reinvented herself as an EnglishRussian translator.
For the past 12 years she lived in the south of Spain with her daughter, who studied acting and later practised as a psychoanalyst.
In 2000 the ‘‘baby ballerinas’’ and others from the Ballets Russes attended their first reunion. It was the starting point for the film Ballets Russes (2005) in which Tchinarova and her colleagues talked about those long-ago days when Balanchine had suggested her knees would have to be stretched.
Finch encouraged her to improve her English by readingWinnie the Pooh.