Anne Rogers
British star of the postwar golden age of ice skating, admired for her ‘incandescent sex appeal’
ANNE ROGERS, who has died aged 89, was a glamorous international ice star of the 1940s and 1950s who won the admiration of the Duke of Edinburgh; on many occasions she skated at his invitation in aid of the National Playing Fields Association.
A petite, 5ft 2in redhead, Anne Rogers was one of the British skaters to achieve international stardom in the postwar golden age of ice spectaculars. She also had what the television presenter Shaw Taylor, who worked with her, described as “incandescent sex appeal”.
Even as a child actress she caught the eye of the influential critic James Agate, who pronounced her “a talent to watch”. In 1943 came an offer to appear at the Ice Drome, Blackpool, in Ice Parade. “My mother was aghast”, she recalled, “but it was for four times the salary I was earning in the theatre, so naturally I accepted.”
In her eighties Anne Rogers noticed at auction a painting by Dame Laura Knight, The Ice Dancer, and was convinced that this was a depiction of her performance on the ice in that first Blackpool season at the age of 15.
In 1944 and 1945 Anne Rogers returned to Blackpool for two further summer seasons. In the second of these she was spotted by a pair of American talent scouts and found herself, aged 17, crossing the Atlantic for her American debut in Ice Cycles of 1946 and 1947, in which her partner was John Moss, a former RAF pilot.
She then teamed with the volatile Swiss skater Armand Perren, then pushing 50, for tours of America, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland in his Ice Follies of 1948. “He was a terrifying control freak and kept threatening to throw me off the ice and into the audience,” she recalled.
Nevertheless, she returned to Britain a fully fledged international skating star, and in 1949 became Tom Arnold’s first pantomime principal boy on ice in the title role of Aladdin in Brighton. Here she was reunited with Eddie Ward, a brilliant skater with whom she had first worked in Blackpool. They were married in 1950 and for the next decade were billed as “Britain’s leading romantic pair skating stars”.
“We did things that were unheard of then, like skating to Wagner in our speciality dances,” she said. “Thirty years later, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean took up the idea of using classical music on the ice and turned it into Olympic Gold, but in our day it was considered ground-breaking, and when we skated to Tristan und Isolde only five years after the end of the war, it caused quite a stir.”
In 1953, when the couple starred at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in Humpty Dumpty on Ice, she was described in the press as the Duke of Edinburgh’s favourite skater. She returned to Wembley in 1954 for her greatest hit, Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years on Ice, playing Grete, with Ward as Franzel. The show toured Britain for more than two years, packing theatres and ice rinks and Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times described her as “the incomparable Anne Rogers”.
When the Wards starred in their final ice pantomime, Humpty Dumpty again, at the Hippodrome, Birmingham, in December 1956, Anne Rogers was three months pregnant. “I didn’t want my children to be brought up by nannies,” she told the Huddersfield Examiner in 2008. “So Eddie and I made a conscious decision to retire from the ice. I was only 28, but I never regretted it.”
She was born Shirley Anne Quarmby on July 10 1928 at Meltham, near Huddersfield, the eldest of the four children of Alexander Quarmby, a fabric producer. Her mother, Joan (née Goddard), was the sister of Theodore Goddard, the solicitor who acted for Wallis Simpson in her divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson.
As a child she was passionate about dancing, and after training at the Cone School and the Italia Conti stage school, she studied with Marie Rambert and Lydia Kyasht, the Russian ballerina. An attack of scarlet fever helped to shape her future: the doctors recommended strenuous exercise and she chose ice skating. In 1935, aged seven, she made her debut in an exhibition performance at the Queen’s Ice Rink in Bayswater.
She made her first showbusiness bow as a straight actress aged 13, playing Tootles, one of the Lost Boys, in the 1942 production of Peter Pan at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, with Alastair Sim as Hook. She joined Donald Wolfit’s Shakespearean company at the Strand Theatre in London followed by West End seasons with three more Peter Pans.
She appeared, usually uncredited, as a child actress in films such as The Night Has Eyes (1942) with James Mason, Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) with Vivien Leigh, and The Lisbon Story (1946) with Patricia Burke.
Anne Rogers continued skating privately until well past her 70th year, and in old age remained slim, elegant and astonishingly youthful. She divided her time between her son’s home in Monaco and her house in Windsor, where she lived surrounded by the mementoes of a dazzling career.
At her 80th birthday party, attended by many former skating stars, a letter of congratulations and good wishes arrived from the Duke of Edinburgh.
Anne Rogers’s marriage to Ward ended in 1960. In 1962 she married another well-known skater, Jack Harnett, who died in 1986, the year in which Ward also died. She is survived by a son and a daughter from her first marriage.
Anne Rogers, born July 10, 1928, died March 6 2018