Robert Helpmann
Sir Robert Murray Helpmann was an Australian ballet dancer, actor, choreographer, and director. After early work in Australia he moved to Britain in 1932, where he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet under its creator, Ninette de Valois. He became one of the company's leading men, partnering Alicia Markova and later Margot Fonteyn. When Frederick Ashton, the company's chief choreographer, was called up for military service in the Second World War, Helpmann took over from him while continuing as a principal dancer.
From the outset of his career Helpmann was an actor as well as a dancer, and in the 1940s he turned increasingly to acting in plays, at the Old Vic and in the West End. Most of his roles were in Shakespeare plays but he also appeared in works by Shaw, Coward, Sartre and others. As a director his range was wide, from Shakespeare to opera, musicals and pantomime.
Helpmann became co-director of the Australian Ballet, in 1965, for whom he created several new ballets. He became sole director in 1975 but disagreements with the company's board led to his dismissal a year later. He directed for Australian Opera and acted in stage plays into the 1980s. Although primarily a stage artist, he appeared in fifteen films between 1942 and 1984, including The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, as the Devil in a film version of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-drama The Soldier's Tale and as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Helpmann died in Sydney and was given a state funeral in St Andrew's Cathedral. The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, gave a tribute in the Parliament of Australia, and a motion of condolence was passed – a rare tribute for a non-politician. Helpmann is commemorated in the Helpmann Awards for Australian performing arts, established in his honour in 2001.
Life and career
Early years
Helpmann was born in Mount Gambier, South Australia, the eldest of the three children of James Murray Helpman, a stock and station agent and auctioneer, and his wife, Mary, née Gardiner. Mary Helpman had a passion for the theatre, and her enthusiasm was passed on to all three of her children. Helpmann's younger brother Max and their sister Sheila both made their own careers on stage, television and screen.After being what his biographer Kathrine Sorley Walker calls "an uninterested and recalcitrant scholar" at Prince Alfred College, Adelaide, Helpmann was taken on as a student apprentice by Anna Pavlova when she was on tour in Australia in 1926. He was trained by Alexis Dolinoff, her leading male dancer. He then joined the theatrical producers J. C. Williamson Ltd, as principal dancer for musicals, revues, and pantomimes, beginning with Franz Lehár's Frasquita in 1927. He later appeared in Katinka, The Merry Widow, The New Moon, Queen High, This Year of Grace and Tip-Toes, appearing with stars such as Gladys Moncrieff, Marie Burke and Maisie Gay. Sorley Walker writes, "His vitality and bravura presentation of dances stopped various shows".
Robert Helpmann cited Melbourne eccentric, beautician, radio broadcaster, actor and dancer Stephanie Deste as one of the influences over his dancing and acting career.
Vic-Wells Ballet
The English actress Margaret Rawlings, who was touring Australia, was impressed by Helpmann. She encouraged him to pursue a career in Britain, and provided him with an introduction to Ninette de Valois, director of the Vic-Wells Ballet. Helpmann left Australia in 1932, and did not return until 1955. De Valois accepted him into her company. He impressed her – she later wrote "Everything about him proclaims the artist born" – although she noted not only his strengths but also his weaknesses: "talented, enthusiastic, extremely intelligent, great facility, witty, cute as a monkey, quick as a squirrel, a sense of theatre and his own possible achievements therein" but "academically technically weak, lacking in concentration, too fond of a good time and too busy having it". In the mid-1930s, probably at Rawlings's suggestion, he added a second "n" to his surname, to give it a more foreign and exotic air.File:Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn, Facade - Anthony.jpg|thumb|Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn in Frederick Ashton's Façade
In April 1934 de Valois created a new ballet, The Haunted Ballroom, with Helpmann and Alicia Markova in the leading roles. The Times commented that of the soloists Helpmann "had the greatest opportunities, and made fine use of them". He co-starred with Markova in Swan Lake, danced in operas, and appeared at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park. In 1935 he was leading dancer in the revue Stop Press, with music by Irving Berlin. At Sadler's Wells he danced the principal role in another new de Valois ballet, The Rake's Progress, and in 1936 Frederick Ashton choreographed a highly romantic ballet, Apparitions, to music by Liszt, featuring Helpmann and the teenaged Margot Fonteyn. Sorley Walker writes that he and Fonteyn were a "perfectly matched partnership", exemplified by "their superb rendering of the Aurora pas de deux in The Sleeping Beauty". As well as romantic leading roles, Helpmann became known for his gift for comedy. Sorley Walker singles out his roles in Coppélia, Ashton's A Wedding Bouquet and de Valois's The Prospect Before Us. Character roles included the doddery Red King in de Valois' Checkmate, which he first danced at the age of 28 and last danced in 1986 when he was 77.
Helpmann's non-ballet work in the later 1930s included his Oberon in Tyrone Guthrie's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic, which also starred Vivien Leigh as Titania and Ralph Richardson as Bottom. The drama critic of The Times wrote:
The doyen of London critics, James Agate, pronounced Helpmann's Oberon to be, in its way, "the best I have ever seen or ever shall see". While at the Old Vic Helpmann met the director Michael Benthall; they formed a lifelong personal partnership and frequently worked together in the theatre.
1940s
During the Second World War Sadler's Wells Ballet became a prominent contributor to public morale, giving London seasons interspersed with a demanding programme of provincial tours. Helpmann's workload often required him to dance leads in three performances in one day, and when Ashton was called up for active service in 1941, Helpmann took on the additional role of choreographer to the company. Ashton, in his enforced absence from the company, observed Helpmann's rise to pre-eminence with feelings of envy, and their relationship became edgy on Ashton's part. The ballets that Helpmann created for the wartime company were Comus, The Birds, Miracle in the Gorbals, and a version of Hamlet set to Tchaikovsky's music. While on leave from the RAF in 1943, Ashton created a new ballet for Helpmann, The Quest, a patriotic tale of Saint George, with music by William Walton, who commented that Helpmann in the lead "looked more like the Dragon than St George." The music has survived but the ballet has not.Helpmann returned to Hamlet in 1944 in the title role of the original play, with the Old Vic company. After the laudatory reviews for his Oberon, those for his Hamlet were more mixed. Ivor Brown thought it "eager, intelligent and exciting", Agate called Helpmann's prince "most heart-breaking" and the young Peter Brook found Helpmann's fast-paced performance highly exciting, but other critics thought it a lightweight interpretation, and opinions varied about the quality of Helpmann's verse-speaking. During the war Helpmann played his first film roles: the supercilious traitor De Jong in One of Our Aircraft is Missing and the comically fussy Bishop of Ely in Laurence Olivier's Henry V.
At the end of the war David Webster was appointed chief executive of the Royal Opera House, tasked with reopening it for opera and ballet after its wartime closure. He invited de Valois and her company to base themselves there to complement the new opera company he was setting up. In due course the companies became The Royal Ballet and The Royal Opera. Helpmann and Fonteyn led the ballet company in the opening gala performance of The Sleeping Beauty. The first new work staged at the reopened house was Adam Zero, with a libretto by Benthall and music by Bliss, choreographed by and starring Helpmann as an Everyman figure. The work was well received and was revived the following year, but has not held a place in the repertoire.
In 1947, together with Benthall, Helpmann took over the artistic direction of the Duchess Theatre in the West End of London. They presented a revival of John Webster's tragedy The White Devil with Helpmann as the villainous Flamineo and Rawlings as his equally villainous sister. This was well received but their next production, a revival of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped, quickly folded. In the same year Helpmann worked on the film The Red Shoes, which he and Leonid Massine choreographed and appeared in. Helpmann joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon for the 1948 season, playing the title role in King John, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and alternating with Paul Scofield in a new production of Hamlet.
1950s
In 1950 Helpmann directed an opera for the first time – the Covent Garden production of Madama Butterfly, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the title role. The production outlasted its director: after many revivals its final performances at the Royal Opera House were in 1993. The following year he joined Olivier and Vivien Leigh at the St James's Theatre, where they presented Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Helpmann played Octavius Caesar in the first and Apollodorus in the second. When the productions were taken to Broadway at the end of the year he played the same roles. He appeared in another Shaw play the following year, as the male lead, the Doctor, opposite Katharine Hepburn as Epifania, in The Millionairess. Between these plays Helpmann acted in the Powell and Pressburger film The Tales of Hoffmann, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and choreographed by Ashton. Helpmann played all four of the villains in the various stories within the opera, his singing voice dubbed by the Welsh bass Bruce Dargavel.In 1953 Helpmann returned to the Old Vic, directing a new production of Murder in the Cathedral with Robert Donat as Becket. On Coronation night in June 1953 Helpmann returned to Covent Garden as a guest artist to dance Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. The following year he again directed and choreographed an opera there, The Golden Cockerel, with a cast including Mattiwilda Dobbs, Hugues Cuénod and Geraint Evans. The following year brought two contrasting directing engagements: the first was The Tempest at the Old Vic, with Michael Hordern as Prospero, Richard Burton as Caliban and Claire Bloom as Miranda. Then followed Noël Coward's musical After the Ball, based on Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. Helpmann discovered that the combination of Coward and Wilde was not a success: "Everything that Noël sent up, Wilde was sentimental about, and everything that Wilde sent up Noël was sentimental about. It was two different points of view and it didn't work."
In May 1955 Helpmann returned to Australia, leading a tour of the country by the Old Vic company, with Hepburn as a guest artist. He played Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Angelo in Measure for Measure and Shylock. At the Old Vic in 1956 he directed John Neville and Claire Bloom in Romeo and Juliet, a production later given on Broadway. He joined the company as an actor later in the year, playing Shylock, Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Saturnius in Titus Andronicus and the title role in Richard III.
During 1957 Helpmann played the title role in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nekrassov, and then took over the lead part of Sebastien in Coward's comedy Nude with Violin in London. The role had been created by John Gielgud, who had been succeeded, not altogether satisfactorily, by Michael Wilding. Helpmann's vitality revived the spirits of the company, and the play continued its run into the following year. Helpmann toured Australia in the piece in 1958–59, after he had returned to ballet for a season at Covent Garden in The Rake's Progress, Hamlet, Coppélia, Miracle in the Gorbals and Petrushka. His performance in the last of these was not well received: in the role of a lovelorn puppet, he was seen as too overtly human and intelligent.