Diana Payne-myers
Veteran variety performer who supported Sinatra and danced with Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet
DIANA PAYNE-MYERS, the dancer and actress, who has died aged 92, had a 70-year stage career of phenomenal variety, beginning in the postwar music hall boom, continuing through the heyday of West End revue, and rising to an unlikely burst of stardom in her seventies and eighties in cutting-edge contemporary dance.
Her ballet skit supported Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on their British tours, she danced with Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet, and she spent her 91st birthday on Broadway appearing in Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls, as the silent maid Edna, a role she had performed for 22 years.
Diana Payne-myers had a bohemian style and sense of inquiry that had led her to abandon a secretarial career for a late training in ballet, and the older she became, the more audacious her career appeared.
As “the Richard Sisters”, she toured Britain’s variety stages in the early 1950s, alongside tightrope walkers, knife-throwers, horses, and dogs, supporting comics of renown, including Max Miller, Morecambe and Wise, Dick Emery and “Mrs Shufflewick” – the drag comedian Rex Jameson, who played a diminutive old Cockney dear telling stories in a pub while becoming increasingly inebriated.
In 1953 Diana Payne (as she was) warmed up for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Glasgow Empire and Sinatra at the Liverpool Empire; Ava Gardner accompanied him, lodging in Southport. Diana PayneMyers remembered Martin fondly for hanging around with the girls in their dressing room, and Lewis for taking them out to dinner after the show to ensure they ate. But she noted in her diary that hers was “the only ballet act who would not sleep with the top of the bill – although the agent constantly tried to persuade them”.
Forty years later, a tiny birdlike figure with grey hair, Diana PayneMyers was an unsettling presence in a traditionally youthful art form, raising questions about age and death in dance-works by the British avantgardists Matthew Hawkins and Lloyd Newson of DV8 Physical Theatre.
In Bound to Please (1997), Newson depicted, in much physical intimacy, a love affair between a young man and an old woman, which had, according to The Sunday Telegraph, “a grisly, mesmerising appeal that both shocks and prevents one looking away.” Diana Payne-myers performed the show more than 60 times over eight months in Europe and Britain.
In another DV8 production, Living Costs, staged at the Tate Modern in 2003, the 65-year-old performer sat on a plinth, naked apart from a pair of knickers, with a sign reading “Please Touch”. One spectator put his finger into her nose, and she did not flinch. Another, overwhelmed, knelt and kissed her foot.
Born in Darlington on March 13 1928, Diana May Payne was the eldest of three children of May (née Torrance) and William Payne, a Gp-surgeon originally from the Isle of Lewis, who would tap-dance while he operated.
She attended Polam Hall School, a Quaker foundation, until aged 12 she was evacuated to Casterton College, a girls’ boarding school in Kirkby Lonsdale. She took dance lessons as a child from Violet Ballantine, who also taught the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, and staged charity shows in the North of England.
Diana Payne longed to become a professional dancer, but her parents thought dance unsuitable and sent her to secretarial college in Lincolnshire, thinking that it would stabilise her mischievous nature.
Undaunted, she rode pillion on a boy’s motorbike down to London to take up a secretary’s job in an architects’ firm, only to throw it in for a bar job to pay for full-time training with Ballet Rambert. A fellow student was Audrey Hepburn.
Her career began with Marie Rambert’s Ballet Workshop in the Mercury Theatre, which she described as “a teeming collection of temperaments” and “a miniature theatre housing mammoth productions”.
Although she was often engaged to dance in Welsh National Opera and Sadler’s Wells Opera productions she longed to be in variety, and “the Richard Sisters” became a regular booking on the Moss touring circuit, with summers spent with the Fol-derols shows: her family planned their holidays around bookings in Torquay or Blackpool.
She made her West End debut in 1951 in the Stoll Theatre children’s production, Where the Rainbow Ends, starring Anton Dolin, playing Will-o’-the-wisp (“delightful”, said a review), and became a regular dancer in London musicals and “intimate” revues, such as Wedding in Paris, A Girl Called Jo, For Amusement Only and For Adults Only. Many were written or produced by a leading light of London’s revue scene, Peter
Myers, whom she married in 1958. She stopped performing to bring up their two children and became an active advocate in the British folk and community dance scene.
Myers, meanwhile, wrote Cliff
Richard’s movie-musicals The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963).
Diana Payne-myers’s second stage career was a spontaneous happening. Her husband died in 1978 at 55, and she was caring for her elderly father when her son, a dancer himself, encouraged her to return to ballet classes.
There she met Matthew Hawkins, an innovative ballet-maker half her age and seemingly twice as tall, who persuaded her back to the stage. They made an eccentric partnership, lushly costumed in lace and tutus by the cult corsetmaker Pearl, in Hawkins’s dance-pieces such as Percy Circus and Muscular Memory Lane.
Based at the rococo Hackney Empire, Hawkins’s company, Fresh Dances, was often invited to French dance festivals, where the francophone Diana Payne-myers was a particular hit.
The unlikely result was that she performed a clog dance for the French Revolution bicentennial in Paris, choreographed by the influential Philippe Decouflé, who also cast her as Emmanuelle Béart’s grandmother in the weird 1996 short film Le dernier chaperon rouge ( The Last Red Riding Hood), directed by Jan Kounen.
For a Palais de Chaillot installation in 1992, Diana Payne-myers was sculpted in grass, which involved having a plaster mould made of her naked body, and then sown with grass seed.
During the 1990s her diverse roles with DV8 brought her theatrical parts in National Theatre shows such as Caryl Churchill’s horror-play The Skriker, Andrew Poppy’s opera of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. After filming Angels in America, the director Mike Nichols made a short 2011 film of Payne-myers at Dungeness, inspired by Tennyson’s “Ulysses”.
The octogenarian continued to display her phenomenal limberness in granny roles, such as Natasha Gilmore’s poignant A Conversation with Carmel, whose tour took her to her father’s birthplace in Stornoway, and Arthur Pita’s God’s Garden, based on the parable of the prodigal son.
In the former, Diana Payne-myers did a cartwheel, and in the latter, the splits.
“It seems to impress people when they think I’m doing the splits, but I’m cheating a little,” she told an interviewer.
In 2002 Diana Payne-myers was appointed MBE for services to dance; she had a brief conversation with the Queen about their old dance teacher, Violet Ballantine. She is survived by her children.
‘It seems to impress people when they think I’m doing the splits [in my eighties], but I’m cheating a little’
Diana Payne-myers, born March 13 1928, died November 7 2020