Anne Heaton
Ballerina gifted with rare dramatic intelligence whose career was cruelly curtailed in her twenties
ANNE HEATON, the ballerina, who has died aged 89, was a brilliant young star of postwar British ballet whose career was cut short by arthritis when she was only 28. As principal ballerina of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, she secured her place in dance history by originating leading roles in two important early ballets by Kenneth Macmillan, where her dark beauty, grace and outstanding dramatic intelligence gave unpalatable truths about human behaviour an enduring and powerful impact.
The Burrow, Macmillan’s claustrophobic 1958 creation about people trapped underground in a nameless fear, referred both to Kafka’s nightmarish short story about rabbits trapped by fear in a warren and to Anne Frank’s diaries of hiding from the Nazis.
Heaton – “taut, agonised and dynamic”, as The Daily Telegraph described her – played the central role as a panic-stricken woman of faded gentility who expressed the rising hysteria that other characters were disguising, embodying an agonised experience of her wartime generation that contrasted with the blithe unconsciousness of postwar adolescence.
Two years later, she had another striking role in an even more shocking ballet by Macmillan, The Invitation, a study of marital breakdown that envisaged an Edwardian house party where the embittered married couple of the house unleash their antipathy towards each other by assaulting two young guests.
Although the explicitness of the choreography of rape was a talking point, the ballet’s acclaim focused on the authenticity of its dramatising of human behaviour, to which Heaton’s poignancy as the emotionally damaged hostess was a major contribution. With her precise technique and grasp of complexity, Anne Heaton was also an exceptional Giselle, described by one critic as “delicate as a lily and as seductive as moonlight on a silver sea”.
However, from her mid-twenties arthritis in her foot caused increasingly frequent absences, and she was forced to retire from full-time ballet in September 1959. “It is tragic that the company is to lose its best dramatic actress,” wrote The Daily Telegraph.
Anne Heaton had known adversity from birth. Born Anne Horsham on November 19 1930 in Rawalpindi, then in India, she was the younger child of Clara (née Beckett) and William Horsham, a warrant officer in the 15th/19th The King’s Royal Hussars. Her mother died, aged 41, in Peshawar military hospital a fortnight after the baby’s birth, and the widowed father, already with a seven-yearold son to raise, sent the newborn girl back to England to be adopted by his wife’s sister, Ellen Jane Heaton, and her husband Guy, an Edgbaston estate agent.
William Horsham suffered a further blow when his son, Peter Horsham, who joined the RAF, was killed in action over Denmark in 1943. As a result Anne knew none of her birth family. Brought up by her aunt and uncle in Birmingham, she took ballet lessons locally.
In 1942 she won a scholarship to the new Sadler’s Wells ballet school, and at 15 was among the first recruits into the newly formed Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet, intended as a young supporting company in the Islington theatre for the main troupe that was to be based at Covent Garden. A classmate was Kenneth Macmillan, the future master choreographer of the Royal Ballet, in whose artistic development she would play a key part.
Choreographers immediately spotted young Anne’s sensitivity, and she made critical impact in two new 1947 ballets, Andrée Howard’s Mardi Gras, playing a girl lost in a nightmarish world of carnival ghosts – “brilliant”, judged the Telegraph – and Frederick Ashton’s contrastingly lyrical ballroom ballet, Valses nobles et sentimentales, with Anne Heaton as a girl desired by two boys.
In 1948 Ninette de Valois summoned her to the Covent Garden company where, in addition to tackling classical roles, she was second cast to Margot Fonteyn as Dulcinea in Ninette de Valois’s new Don Quixote, and originated the young witch persecuted by Puritans in Andrée Howard’s A Mirror for Witches, to glowing reviews.
In 1954 she made an acclaimed debut in Giselle with John Field, and when in 1956 he became director of Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, he asked Anne Heaton to return to Sadler’s Wells as principal ballerina; she became his second wife in 1958.
Her artistry hit its heights in the late 1950s, when the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet became a cauldron of choreographic creativity. She brought classical distinction to Swan Lake and Giselle, and her renowned dramatic power to new ballets by Ashton, Howard, Peter Wright and Alfred Rodrigues.
Above all, her achievement was attached to Macmillan’s explosive emergence as the choreographer who introduced classical ballet to a modern psychological world, particularly with her defining performances in The Burrow and The Invitation.
After her official retirement, Anne Heaton consoled herself by playing the Diamond Fairy in the London Coliseum’s Christmas 1959 pantomime, Cole Porter’s Aladdin, staged by Robert Helpmann for Bob Monkhouse. She then discovered an enthusiasm for teaching, joining the Arts Educational School staff, and supporting her husband’s directorship at Sadler’s Wells.
In 1970 Field was appointed by Covent Garden to co-direct the Royal Ballet with Macmillan, but resigned after confusion over the sharing of duties. He went on to run the La Scala Ballet in Milan and, briefly, London Festival Ballet, while Anne Heaton staged Giselle in Tehran for the Iranian National Ballet.
In 1984 she and John Field became co-directors of the British Ballet Organisation, Britain’s oldest ballet teaching academy, relinquishing it when Field became terminally ill in 1991. They had no children.
Anne Heaton, born November 19 1930, died May 1 2020