Founded dance school after fleeing Nazis

Stella Mann, who established one of Britain’s best-known professional dance schools after escaping Nazi persecution in her native Austria, has died at the age of 100.

She was already a successful modern dance soloist and teacher in Vienna when, in March 1938, Adolf Hitler declared the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. Mann fled to Belgium, where she spent most of the war as a fugitive. Her Jewish parents, meanwhile, were sent to a concentration camp and shot.

Born Stella Tuttman in Vienna on Jan. 24, 1912, she was the younger daughter of the Singer sewing machine company’s legal adviser. She took dancing classes at 10 from her uncle, and at 15 joined the studio of celebrated dancer Gertrud Kraus.

At 17, Stella was herself teaching modern dance, and in the 1930s (using the surname Mann) she combined this with solo performing. By 1938, she had her own dance and gymnastics school in Vienna with 500 pupils.

After escaping to Belgium, she was at first able to work freely. When that country was occupied, she and five compatriots attempted to cross into France but were arrested by the Germans. Mann was fortunate. Because she had married a Yugoslav called Brunov (a marriage of convenience), she was able to claim his nationality, and the Germans released her after a few days; her five fellow Austrians simply disappeared.

When the British army arrived in Belgium in 1944, she met Sgt. Derrick Ashby-Mott, who was a talented ballroom dancer. Following the annulment of her first marriage, they married in 1946 and moved to England.

Mann set up a dance school in Hampstead, at first teaching the children of Viennese and Jewish refugees but later broadening her clientele. She offered an unusually eclectic range of lessons in modern dance, with classical ballet and tap from visiting teachers.