Julia Farron
Teenage star of the pre-war Vic-wells ballet who became director of the Royal Academy of Dance
JULIA FARRON, who has died just short of her 97th birthday, was the first teenage star of the early years of the Vicwells Ballet, later the Royal Ballet; her career began by playing a dog in a tutu, and ended as the Director of the Royal Academy of Dance. Pépé the Mexican terrier was an eye-catching character in A Wedding Bouquet, a ballet contrived in 1937 by the choreographer Frederick Ashton and the composer and socialite Lord Berners from a surreal play by Berners’s house guest Gertrude Stein.
Played by the 15-year-old Julia Farron in a brown dog-leotard, Pépé was the pet of a forlorn young woman invited to her ex’s marriage, a disastrous occasion undone by its farcically unsuitable guest list of former and current lovers of both persuasions.
The entertainment was hatched at Berners’s famously flamboyant country home in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, where he liked to dye his pigeons, eat blue food, and decorate his many dogs with Woolworths’ pearl necklaces.
Julia Farron’s preternatural sophistication impressed the team and the following year Ashton put her centre-stage in the similarly eccentric Cupid and Psyche, another parodic Berners collaboration, in which she was young Psyche on a Mount Olympus populated by bawdy, inebriated gods and goddesses. It should have made the young dancer’s name, but the costumes were incomplete, the conductor was drunk, and Julia Farron herself was knocked over by a flying stunt that went wrong. The ballet was booed off the Sadler’s Wells stage.
Playing Pan, Psyche’s protector, the leading male dancer Michael Somes became infatuated with the teenager, which caused her redoubtable mother to insist on chaperoning her on the company’s wartime tour of Britain.
The soldiers were largely unappreciative, until one night when Julia Farron’s shoulder strap snapped in a deep arabesque, and a colleague was not quite quick enough to get his hat over her breast – the incident was recalled by several dancers as the tour’s most popular moment.
Although Farron lacked the sure technique of Margot Fonteyn, her senior by three years, her charisma and brilliant mime skills made her a frequent first choice for major roles by the choreographers who would be the backbone of the future Royal Ballet, Ashton, Ninette de Valois, John Cranko and Kenneth Macmillan.
Rather as Margot Fonteyn inspired new heights of technical skill in young Royal Ballet ballerinas, Julia Farron inspired wide appreciation of her
creative authenticity in the “character” playing of roles often considered mere tokens – queens, mothers, sisters and rivals. The ballet star Christopher Gable, who identified stage artistry as the central reason for the Royal Ballet’s worldwide reputation, singled out Julia Farron as one of the greatest of Britain’s stage artists.
She brought a spiky competitiveness to the virtuous heroines’ less virtuous rivals in Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe (both by Ashton) and Cranko’s The Prince of the Pagodas, in which she was the first Princesse Belle-epine (“delightfully spiteful”, said one commentator), and she oozed Mediterranean capriciousness as Massine’s featherheaded Mam’zelle Angot in The Three-cornered Hat.
By contrast, she also invested the fallen women in de Valois’s The Rake’s Progress and Robert Helpmann’s Miracle in the Gorbals with a moving naturalism, and she originated a wide range of interesting “mother” characters, as Jocasta in Cranko’s pre-war Antigone and, most memorably, as the histrionic and high-strung Lady Capulet in Macmillan’s world-famous Romeo and Juliet of 1965 (she was filmed in the role with Fonteyn and Nureyev), for which Macmillan persuaded her out of retirement.
Two enduring roles created for her captured the poles of Farron’s abilities: Ashton’s brilliant Neapolitan tarantella for a tireless couple with tambourines, which invariably stops the show in the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, and her venomously beautiful Carabosse, the bad fairy in The Sleeping Beauty.
In the 1968 Royal Ballet staging by Peter Wright, Julia Farron, wearing a huge black dress with a lizard’s tail, disappeared into a hole in the stage shrieking so loudly that Ashton said to Wright: “Do tell Julia to shut her trap.”
A still more fateful dowager role was that of the Red Queen in Ninette de Valois’s chess ballet Checkmate in 1948, when her bodice snagged on the hose of a passing Black Castle, and they could not be disentangled for the remainder of the ensemble, which disintegrated into confusion, enraging the watching de Valois.
The Black Castle was the dancer Alfred Rodrigues, and he and Julia Farron were married soon after.
Julia Farron was the stage name of Joyce Margaret Farron-smith, born on July 22 1922 in London, the elder of two children of Amy (née Henry) and Hubert Farron-smith, a career civil servant.
After dance and theatre lessons with Grace Cone, the nine-year-old was the first child to be offered a scholarship by Ninette de Valois for the new Vic-wells Ballet School, and five years later was hired into the Vic-wells Ballet at the unprecedented age of 14.
Her first Covent Garden appearance was as a huntress leading Cranko’s “Ritual Dances” at the premiere of Michael Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, and her performing career would last 35 years, broken briefly in 1949 to bear her son Christopher (the first baby to be born into the ballet company).
She switched to teaching at the Royal Ballet School in 1964, returning to the stage at Macmillan’s insistence for Lady Capulet, a role she finally bowed out of in 1976. In 1982 she was appointed first Assistant Director, then Director, of the Royal Academy of Dance. She retired in 1989, with an honorary life fellowship, and five years later was awarded the RAD’S Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award for outstanding services to ballet. She was appointed OBE in 2012.
In the 1990s Farron became the “legs” for her husband, Alfred Rodrigues, by then much sought-after as a choreographer, but who had become wheelchair-bound – she would demonstrate to the dancers when he staged and created ballets.
In 2014 she assisted with Gillian Lynne’s resurrection for Birmingham Royal Ballet Robert Helpmann’s ballet, Miracle in the Gorbals, and appeared in a BBC television documentary about Britain’s wartime ballet, Dancing in the Blitz.
Julia Farron’s husband died in 2002, and she is survived by their son, Christopher Rodrigues, former Chairman of the British Council.
Julia Farron, born July 22 1922, died July 3 2019