Zizi Jeanmaire
Extraordinary dancer and singer who seduced audiences with wit and flamboyance
ZIZI Jeanmaire, the dancer and cabaret artist, who died last Friday aged 96, was one of Paris’s mostcelebrated entertainers — an extraordinary, gamine ballet dancer who crossed over into the boites de nuit to become a legendarily witty and seductive singing performer.
Married to the chic ballet choreographer Roland Petit, Zizi Jeanmaire was sought after by the greatest male dancers, such as Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, both of whom were filmed dancing with her in Petit’s ballets. Her popular status was sealed by Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 hit pop single, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?, which cited Zizi Jeanmaire as the ultimate dancer.
The diminutive Zizi, with her short black bob, and the tall, rakish Petit, were Paris’s defining culture couple in the 1950s and 1960s, attracting cultural figures from all corners. Petit was felt to have reinvented ballet in a fresh, Parisian way and Zizi Jeanmaire’s boy-girl sexiness and sharp wit became an inspiration to cutting-edge designers and songwriters. Without her, said the leading French poet and publisher Louis Aragon, “Paris would not be Paris”.
Yves Saint Laurent, her close friend, designed costumes, frothing with feathers and sequins, for Zizi Jeanmaire’s extravagant shows. Meanwhile, her husband ensured that her legs were deployed to memorable effect every bit as naughty as her songwriters’ lyrics. Mon Truc en Plumes, which roughly translates as “My Thingumajig in Feathers”, became her calling card musically and visually, with its peekaboo effects among pink plumes.
Born on April 29, 1924 in Paris, Renee Marcelle Jeanmaire was the only child of Swiss parents, and began as petit rat in the Paris Opera Ballet School at nine, alongside Petit. It was the start of a 78-year relationship, professional and private, that ended only on his death in 2011.
She joined the august ballet company on the eve of war, when she was 15, taken under the wing of the brilliant young ballerina Yvette Chauvire. But the younger dancer recognised that she would never be the classical sylph epitomised by Chauvire, and she and Petit quit the Paris Opera Ballet in 1944 when both were 20.
Zizi Jeanmaire joined the Ballets Russes follow-up companies of Colonel de Basil, while Petit set up his own company, Les Ballets des Champs-Elysees, which rapidly became the most talkedabout company in Western
Europe: modern, sexy and up to date, and starring the remarkable and unorthodox dancers, Renee Jeanmaire and Jean Babilee.
One of those talking about Petit was London’s leading ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, with whom he had a significant affair while also retaining Zizi Jeanmaire’s affections. She gave Petit an ultimatum: he must create a ballet for her or she would leave him. “I am not romantique — my temperament is bouillante, boiling hot,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 1998.
The result was Carmen ,a devastatingly arousing modern ballet premiered at the Princess Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1949. At Petit’s request, Zizi Jeanmaire bobbed her hair short and wore a brief black corset. The erotic directness of her pas de deux with Petit caused, it was said, visible excitement among males in the audience, and the British ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton commented sadly that his own neo-classical ballets would now be considered old-fashioned.
Success took the company to sell-out tours in America, and led to Hollywood invitations. In 1952 Petit choreographed (at Howard Hughes’s request) Hans Christian Andersen for Zizi Jeanmaire and Danny Kaye; but his affairs with Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor caused an inevitable rift with his leading lady.
After two years’ separation, they reunited and married in 1954. Zizi Jeanmaire then featured in Anything Goes (alongside Bing Crosby) but to her chagrin, was giving birth to a daughter, Valentine, when her husband was called to choreograph Daddy Long Legs for Fred Astaire in 1955. The female lead went to a young Zizi lookalike, Leslie Caron.
In 1956, Zizi was back in front of the cameras for the revue film Folies Bergeres, and that year Petit made his first Paris stage revue for her. He had first had her sing in a ballet in 1950 in La Croqueuse de Diamants (The Gold Digger), in which her husky, suggestive voice had won her the Grand Prix du Disque award.
Now he developed her versatility to reveal a complete stage artist whose flamboyance, wit and suggestiveness would sell countless records and cost thousands of ostriches their feathers.
Meanwhile, she also continued to dance Petit’s dramatic ballets with an uncanny resistance to time that only deepened her allure. In 1966 she starred as the mysterious woman luring a young man to suicide in a film of Petit’s ballet Le jeune homme et la mort with Nureyev; in 1980 she was filmed with Baryshnikov in Petit’s Carmen for a television production that retains its potency today.
Zizi Jeanmaire is survived by her daughter, the songwriter Valentine Petit.