Tamara Tchinarova Finch
Dancer with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo who settled in Australia and married Peter Finch
TAMARA TCHINAROVA FINCH, who has died aged 98, was one of the last surviving dancers of the historic Ballets Russes and married the film actor Peter Finch, whom she divorced after he began an affair with Vivien Leigh.
Dancing alongside the famous “baby ballerinas” when she was just 12, she was one of the group of Russian dancers who would found the Australian ballet after being stranded there by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Tamara Evsevyevna Rekemchuk was Bessarabian, born on July 18 1919 in an area that would be repossessed, first by Romania at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and then by Soviet Ukraine in 1945.
Exile and political persecution were common to both sides of her family. Her parents, Evsey Rekemchuk and Anna Chinaryan, were also Bessarabian, but her mother’s parents were Armenians, refugees from Turkish genocide who became rich through vineyards. They would be murdered by Soviet troops in 1940.
Her father, of Georgian and Ukrainian roots, had been wounded fighting in a “Death Battalion” during the First World War, and had married her mother, his hospital nurse, in 1918. A fervent supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Rekemchuk found himself persona non grata in the new Romanian state, and in the early 1920s transferred his family to Paris, where they lived a grim existence as he failed to find buyers for his pro-lenin journalism.
When he decided to settle in the USSR, taking a job with the state newspaper Izvestia, Tamara and her anti-bolshevik mother remained in Paris. On one of his occasional visits to Paris, he took his small daughter to see the Diaghilev ballet, and she instantly decided to become a ballerina. Only in her old age did she discover that her father had been shot as a spy in Stalin’s mass purges of 1937, and officially rehabilitated under Khrushchev.
Tamara Tchinarova joined the classes of the Imperial Russian ballerina Olga Preobrazhenskaya, who charitably taught the children of poorer émigrés, and made her stage debut carrying the singer Fyodor Chaliapin’s train in Boris Godunov.
Aged 10 she made her professional dance debut on a North African tour, billed as “the smallest ballerina in the world”. Soon afterwards she was spotted by the influential choreographer George Balanchine as he scouted for six children for an operetta. As a consequence, the 12-year-old became a full-time professional dancer with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, the renowned successor company to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Her peers included three other very young girl dancers, whom Balanchine hired for his one-season wonder, Les Ballets 1933 – they were dubbed the “baby ballerinas”. Tamara Tchinarova understudied the dark-haired Tamara Toumanova, with whom, being equally beautiful, she was frequently confused.
Although their seasons in Paris and at the Savoy in London, supported by the surrealist art patron Edward James, bombed with the critics, Tamara Tchinarova was quickly hired back to the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and toured the US three times to wild acclaim, visiting 100 venues on the final tour. In Los Angeles Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich came backstage.
On the company’s Australian tour, the 17-year-old made a considerable impact in the abstract role of “Action” in Massine’s symphonic Tchaikovsky ballet Les Présages and the exotic name part in Fokine’s Thamar, a fable about the Georgian queen who stabbed all her lovers and threw their corpses over her turret when she was finished with them.
“At first many people didn’t want to go [to Australia],” she recalled. “We thought that kangaroos would be jumping along the streets in the towns, and convicts would be going about jingling their chains. I signed the contract for a year on the condition that when we returned to the main troupe I would be given back my solo numbers. Of course, no one gave them back. I remember how soul-destroying it was after Australia where I had danced the main roles: when we returned home I was again crammed to the back.”
Her second Australian visit, with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet in 1938, proved life-changing. The tour was interrupted by the outbreak of war and she was one of 10 Russian dancers who decided to stay on in Australia, a decision that laid the foundations of the Australian ballet. Tamara Tchinarova became a principal ballerina with the Kirsova and Borovansky companies, performing leading roles in famous Ballets Russes works such as the sultan’s favourite in Fokine’s Shéhérazade and the alluring street-dancer in Massine’s Le Beau Danube.
In 1943 the ballerina met and married the rising Australian actor Peter Finch, who encouraged his wife – who had left school aged 12 – to learn English from the plays of Shakespeare. Touring the Old Vic to Australia in 1948, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh saw Peter Finch act and suggested he had a future in Britain. Tamara Tchinarova Finch bore their daughter Anita in London the following year, but in 1956, discovering Finch was having an affair with Vivien Leigh, she divorced him.
Finch went on to become an award-winning British actor, married twice more, fathered several more children, and died in 1977 aged 60. “I loved my husband madly, but not the fact that he liked to drink,” said Tamara Finch.
Her dancing days over, she found a new direction in 1961 when the Foreign Office asked her to be an interpreter at a Moscow industrial exhibition, and for the next 20 years she recalled that she mostly translated conversations about cars.
Her ballet past proved a career asset in the 1980s when she became the interpreter of choice for British newspaper interviews with Bolshoi and Kirov ballet stars visiting Britain. Tamara Finch rediscovered her own family’s fate and became a key source for historians of the Ballets Russes around the world, particularly in Australia.
Her colourful personal memories of the great names of 20th-century Russian ballet, such as Michel Fokine, Leonid Massine and Bronislava Nijinska, brought the legends to life. Nijinska, she recalled, “always wore white gloves because she didn’t want to touch the ballet dancers: they sweated and she found that disagreeable. We felt like lepers.”
She wrote excellently in English and produced many dance articles for the magazine Dancing Times among others. In 2007 she published her autobiography Dancing Into the Unknown – My Life in the Ballets Russes and Beyond.
Tamara Tchinarova Finch moved to Spain 12 years ago to join her daughter, who survives her.
Tamara Tchinarova Finch, born July 18 1919, died August 31 2017