A few years ago, when I asked Beryl Grey what makes a good dancer, she told me it was sheer delight in movement. Not fine technique, but personality. “We all had this wonderful joy of dance,” she said, speaking about her contemporaries in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet – later the Royal Ballet – of the 1940s and 50s. It was a quality that shone through in Grey’s own dancing. If Margot Fonteyn was an adored icon of elegant, graceful restraint, Grey was the sparky girl next door, bright, beaming and quick on her feet.
Grey was tall for a dancer of the time (about 5ft 7in), but strong and speedy. Watch the Pathé newsreel of her landmark Swan Lake at the Bolshoi theatre in 1958, the first western ballerina to perform there, and she rips through Odile’s famous 32 fouettés at pace. Her black swan is not the hard-faced antiheroine we see so often now; she can’t hide that pleasure in performing, the warmth and wide smile. She has character, panache and class, gliding over the music. It was all about the music for Grey, the story all there to be found in the score.
Contemporary reviews noted her ease and confidence on stage, she was “gracious and commanding” as Sleeping Beauty’s Lilac Fairy; in Les Sylphides, she was described as a “drifting dream of warmth and softness”. Critic Arnold Haskell raved about her “pure lyrical beauty”. Nothing seemed to floor her, not even the most fiendish technicalities. This was the woman who danced her first Swan Lake on her 15th birthday, having joined Sadler’s Wells Ballet at 14 – to cover for a dancer who was ill – and never left.
Whatever it is that makes a great dancer, Grey had it from the off. As a north London schoolgirl, she completed all the available ballet exams by the age of nine and joined the Vic-Wells ballet school at 10, in 1937. Amid the devastation of the second world war, there were opportunities for young dancers as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet toured the country and audiences flocked to their shows for a few hours of escapism. When a V2 bomb went off while Grey was dancing Swan Lake at a London theatre, she carried on regardless.
Grey had a mind of her own. She took lessons outside the company with teacher Audrey de Vos, who incorporated ideas from modern dance, then emergent in the US. Aged 30, she left what had just become the Royal Ballet and toured South Africa, South and Central America, Russia and later China. She had intelligence on and off stage – as a child she had thought about giving up ballet to become a doctor, but she applied her brains to running a company instead, taking over as artistic director of Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet) in 1968, pushing up the standards of the dancers and repertoire, and bringing in megastar Rudolf Nureyev to create work for her.
Reading Grey’s 2017 autobiography, For the Love of Dance, you’re bowled over by how busy she was. As well as the logistics of touring or running a company, there were the lectures, TV appearances, radio programmes, articles. She also brought up a son and insisted on cleaning her London townhouse from top to bottom; the work ethic was phenomenal. In later life, Grey stayed deeply involved with ballet, on boards and committees and coaching dancers in the studio, and was still seen in the Covent Garden audience. When that became more difficult, following surgery for bowel cancer in 2017, she watched broadcasts at her local cinema in Uckfield.
When I met her at 92 she remained slim and poised, bright-eyed and quick to giggle, a woman who became a formative part of British ballet history simply by pursuing her sheer delight in movement.
