Scott Ambler
Expressive choreographer and dancer renowned for Swan Lake
SCOTT AMBLER, the dancer and choreographer, who has died aged 57, became an unlikely world star with his haunting performance as the prince who falls in love with a male swan in Matthew Bourne’s globally celebrated modern Swan Lake. He later became a theatre choreographer of hits such as Enron, This House and Lord of the Flies.
Although at the 1995 premiere of Swan Lake the Royal Ballet star Adam Cooper’s balletic featherbreeched swan was the poster boy, it was Ambler who infused the Royal Family satire with the pathos that turned the iconoclastic show into an award-winning classic, and the Adventures in Motion Pictures troupe into Britain’s most talkedabout company.
Ambler had begun dancing only at 16 and said that his biggest fear was looking like a potato next to Cooper. However, their duets made mesmerising human drama and the pair shared the Hollywood critics’ Drama-logue Outstanding Performance award of 1997 after their US tour. His resemblance to Prince Charles sharpened the impact of the Palace jokes, and one adoring fan fainted when she met him after a show.
Ambler’s range, from light comedy to sinister or tragic, inspired Bourne to create a dozen roles for him. An extremely funny man in person, he produced self-deprecating depths in the Noël Coward-inspired Town and Country, the mock underwear commercial Spitfire, and the erotic japes of Drip and Late Flowering Lust, a Betjeman-inspired 1993 BBC film with Nigel Hawthorne.
In Bourne’s first fulllength work, Highland Fling, a 1994 Glasgow-slum parody of the early ballet La Sylphide, Ambler starred as the hilarious lager lout James, flashing the audience with his bare buttocks under his kilt as he chased fairies through rubbish tips.
His tragic power in Swan Lake came as a surprise – the performance was filmed for DVD in 1996. Other Ambler signature roles were the camp King Sherbert in Nutcracker!, the violent cuckolded Dino in The Car Man (2000) and the manipulative manservant Prentice in Bourne’s 2002 creation Play Without Words, which Ambler helped to choreograph.
Timothy Scott Ambler was born in Leeds on October 9 1960, the younger child of Phyllis (née Scott) and William Ambler, who were printers. He left school at 16 to work in a bookshop, taking dance lessons after friends bought him a class as a birthday present.
Despite his late start, he gained entry to the Rambert Academy in London, where he began choreographing, notably Crow and Boys’ Own. After performing with Extemporary Dance and Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 he turned up at a 1990 audition for Matthew Bourne. They and another audition candidate, Etta Murfitt, hit it off instantly and forged a collaboration that launched Adventures in Motion Pictures, later renamed New Adventures, into world fame.
After assisting Bourne with West End choreography for Peer Gynt, My Fair Lady, South Pacific and Oliver!, Ambler was sought out by the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company and West End producers. He directed actors in the trading floor antics of Enron, Olympic athletics in Chariots of Fire
– for which he was nominated for an Olivier – and parliamentary cock-ups in This House. His musical theatre choreography included Passion for Donmar Warehouse.
But Ambler’s most personal and daring work was his remarkable dance evocation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, directed by Bourne, for which he recruited schoolboys at each venue from Glasgow to London. Its 2014 British tour was acclaimed. “Exhilarating. You are simply gripped by the power and emotion of the storytelling,” wrote the Telegraph critic.
Scott Ambler is survived by his sister, Jaki.
Scott Ambler, born October 9 1960, died March 17 2018