Obit: Gillian Lynne was a leading light
The choreographer with ferocious energy helped create dozens of hits including ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’
Dame Gillian Lynne, who has died aged 92, was a figure of extraordinary versatility and longevity in the dance world, the choreographer of such world-renowned musicals as Cats and The Phantom
of the Opera, the creator of scores of stage shows and television dance films, and also a former Royal Ballet ballerina, musical theatre star, and a Hollywood co-star — and lover — of Errol Flynn.
Even as she approached 90, she kept a working pace of ferocious energy, recreating a lost 1940s classical ballet for Birmingham Royal Ballet and co-directing a large new production of Cats in the West End in 2014. She told an interviewer: “It’s only because I’ve been so busy I’ve not had time to die.”
Her CV of shows, roles and awards ran to 10 pages.
Two weeks ago she became the first non-royal woman to have her name on a West End theatre, when the composer of
Cats, Lord Lloyd-Webber, renamed the New London Theatre, Drury Lane — the venue for the show’s record-breaking 21-year run — the Gillian Lynne Theatre. Lynne was borne onstage in a golden throne by four bare-chested men, bedecked with pink os-
trich feathers. With her long slim limbs, frequently displayed to great advantage in short dresses and leotards even in her eighties, Lynne insisted that her arrestingly youthful looks were the result of being married to a man 24 years younger than her.
Lynne crossed every borderline in dance, choreographing straight ballets for Western Theatre Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet, creating new television ballet dramas and enjoyed being known in the dance business as the “queen of sexy”.
“I remember saying to the cast of Cats that we wanted it to be the sexiest show ever,” she recalled. “I told them that our aim
was to make people jump up from their seats, rush home and leap into bed to make love.” Yet she also regularly created the dances for the Royal Opera and English National Opera — for Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Parsifal, Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage and Berlioz’s The Trojans, as well as for popular films such as Wonderful Life, Half a Sixpence, Yentl and Man of La Mancha.
Despite two hip replacements (she shared a surgeon with the Queen Mother), she remained able to tuck her feet behind her ears at 88, and produced a fitness DVD to prove it. “Retirement’s the biggest mistake you can make,” she said.
It was her creation of
Cats with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn in 1981 that was Gillian Lynne’s passport to world celebrity. An acrobatic “dance-ical” in cat costumes making a sexy semi-pantomime from
T S Eliot’s poems was hardly expected to be a world smash, but it ran for 18 years on Broadway and 21 in the West End.
The record-breaking popularity and longevity of Cats were overtaken in 1986 by the next Lloyd Webber musical with Gillian Lynne as musical stager and choreographer, Phantom of the Opera.
Lynne used her backstage knowledge of the Royal Opera House to bring atmospheric veracity to the Paris Opera of the story, and it became the most financially successful musical ever created.
It is still playing in New York, by a long margin the longest-running Broadway show in history.
Gillian
Lynne’s first marriage to the barrister Patrick St John back in 1948 did not survive her affair with Errol Flynn. In 1980, during auditions for My Fair Lady, which she was directing, a 27-year-old actor, Peter Land, auditioned for the juvenile lead, Freddy Eysnford-Hill. “He was standing there at the bar, and he was drop-dead gorgeous. We just looked at each other,” she recalled. He was exactly half her age when they married in 1980.
Peter Land survives her. There were no children.