Helpmann via The Royal Ballet School Collections, White Lodge Museum

April 9, 1909 – Robert Helpmann:

“The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music stops.“

Sir Robert Helpmann was an international ballet star and choreographer, plus a noted actor and director. A great mimic with a flamboyant sense of the theatrical, Helpmann moved from ballet to stage to films with an ease and flair that both confounded and charmed his audiences and colleagues, who included the major artistic figures of his day, such as Vivien Leigh, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Sir Frederick Ashton.

Born and trained in Australia, he was one of British ballet’s premier male dancers in the 1930s and 1940s, and he was a dancer who could act and an actor who could dance. His personality and talent played a vital part in making men in ballet popular with the public.

In the 1930s, he was once attacked while walking on Bondi Beach by a group of guys who evidently objected to his painted nails, plucked eyebrows, and pink shirt.

When Helpmann took that final bow in 1986 at 77 years old, Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic for The New York Times, wrote:

“There are no Helpmanns today in the big ballet companies. Individuality of this type is no longer tolerated except among guest artists. The elimination of strong personality as part of a team results in uniformity among dancers. Such individuality is more natural to a company with pioneering zeal.“

When he was young, he studied with the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova during her time in Melbourne. He later moved to London in 1933 to study and perform with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet). He was the leading male star with that company from 1934 until his resignation in 1950, frequently appearing with Fonteyn. During his years with Sadler’s Wells, he would take time off to act. Film fans remember him best for his work in The Red Shoes (1948).

The stylish The Red Shoes was written, directed, and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as “The Archers”. When it opened, The Red Shoes received positive reviews but did not at first earn much money in Britain. The film received only a limited release in the U.S. in a 110-week run at a single theatre, still earning $2.2 million. The success of this run convinced the bosses at Universal Studios that The Red Shoes was a worthwhile film and they took over the distribution in 1951. The Red Shoes then became one of the highest earning British films of all time.

The Red Shoes is about backstage life at the ballet. Helpmann didn’t just act in it; he danced and contributed to the choreography. Years later, when an interviewer asked him if the over-the-top portrayal of the events and lives of the ballet dancers were exaggerated, he replied:

“Oh, no, dear boy, it was quite understated.”

Reviews from ballet critics in the UK and in the USA were mixed, many criticized the film for being clichéd and unrealistic. Yet The Red Shoes remains one of the few films that treated ballet seriously. After he made the MGM executives watch The Red Shoes a few times, Gene Kelly was able to include ballet in An American In Paris (1951).

In the 1937-38 season, Helpmann beat Laurence Olivier for the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic Theater, opposite Vivien Leigh. He later repeated that role opposite Moira Shearer for a production at the Metropolitan Opera House that then toured in 1954. In 1948, he danced in his own very Freudian ballet version of Hamlet, then played Hamlet in the Old Vic Theater production of the play, a role he repeated later at the Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-on-Avon, alternating with Paul Scofield.

Helpmann and Fonteyn in The Quest via YouTube

In the mid-1950s, Helpmann produced a new version of Giacomo Puccini‘s opera La Boheme and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov‘s Coq d’Or for the Royal Opera House, and T. S. Eliot‘s Murder In The Cathedral for the Old Vic, and directed the musical Camelot when it was staged in London. He was so perfect for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with his light voice and dancer’s style of movement his greatest assets in the role. Both were to cause him some later trouble in theatre.

In 1955 Helpmann returned to Australia as an actor, anxious to be accepted at home as something more than a dancer. He had a triumph touring with Katharine Hepburn, playing Shylock to her Portia in The Merchant Of Venice; Petrucchio to her Kate in The Taming Of The Shrew and the Duke to her Isabella in Measure For Measure. Helpmann needed the success of that Australian tour after his production of Noël Coward‘s musical, After The Ball, had just been an unexpected failure in London.

In her memoir, Me: Stories of My Life (1991) Hepburn wrote:

“My friend of now and long ago is as hard to get close to as a porcupine. He seems easy and indiscreet, amiable and fun. He’s sharp in every sense of the word. He’s tough, he’s loving, he’s delicious to know. I can tell you what is at the core of him: ‘I am going to do it’. And he does it.“

From 1965 to 1975, he was co-director of The Australian Ballet. Helpmann was knighted in 1968.

His other film acting credits include the trippy Tales Of Hoffmann (1951), the peculiar 55 Days At Peking (1963), and the sinister Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). His performance in that film was rated by Empire magazine as among the 100 most frightening ever filmed. He also played the Mad Hatter in a nutty all-star version of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1972).

In 1979, Helpmann and Rudolf Nureyev both directed and starred in the acclaimed film version of the ballet Don Quixote.

Helpmann was the most gifted Australian theatrical polymath until the arrival of Cate Blanchett. Among his peers in Britain and America only his friend and sometime collaborator Noël Coward surpassed him. He rose to the highest level in ballet, theatre, film and opera.

During his celebrated ballet career, Helpmann frequently danced nine programs a week, including three on Saturdays, whether he was suited to the roles or not. Among his triumphs were both Prince Florimund and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty, Doctor Coppelius in Coppelia and Albrecht in Giselle.

Helpmann was openly gay. Duh. In 1938, He met Michael Benthall a 17-year-old Oxford undergraduate while performing in a dance concert at the university. He was immediately drawn to the handsome and intelligent Benthall, and they began a romance that lasted for 36 years until Benthall’s death in 1974. The couple lived and often worked together quite openly for the time. Although devastated by the loss of his longtime companion and collaborator, Helpmann continued to act, direct and produce with his legendary theatrical flair until his death.

Helpmann Benthall via Wikimedia Commons

Benthall was quite talented also; he directed a London production of Hamlet jointly with Tyrone Guthrie. He was the artistic director of the Old Vic between 1953 and 1962 and produced all the Shakespeare plays in the First Folio over five years.

Benthall directed the Broadway musical Coco (1968) starring Hepburn with a score by André Previn and Alan Jay Lerner, and choreography by Michael Bennett. Benthall then directed Her First Roman (1969), a musical version of George Bernard Shaw‘s Caesar And Cleopatra.

Helpmann once wrote: “Without emotion an artist cannot function. Emotion influences me more than sex“, an unlikely statement from the man who believed that ballet is a sexual art.

When he formed the Australian Ballet in 1965, the younger members were in anxious awe as they awaited his first appearance. He swept in under a load of costume and cut the tension with:

“Hello darlings, it’s your new mum.“

A smoker, he was dancing in the ballet Checkmate when he was admitted to a hospital with respiratory problems in July 1986. He was discharged, rejoined the Australian Ballet in Adelaide, but was disappointed that he was not allowed to perform again. He died in Sydney soon after of smoking-related illnesses. His obituaries in the Australian media were rather reserved, even as he was being celebrated.

He had always managed the media with charm and wit, ready with a quip, a quote and a new angle. Fabulous, he dressed in a mink coat, silver and gold bangles, neck chains with medallions as big as small saucers, shoe buckles, cowboy boots, safari suits, high-collared leather jackets, and rings set with large yellow diamonds.

He was honored with a state funeral in Sydney, the eulogy calling him:

“…a genius, an outstanding communicator of unique inspiration and insight. He asserted his rights to pursue a path that improved the quality of life of the nation, and defeated the common herd of detractors.“

However, his obituary in The London Times stated:

“His appearance was strange, haunting and rather frightening. There were, moreover, streaks in his character that made his impact upon a company dangerous as well as stimulating. A homosexual of the proselytizing kind, he could turn young men on the borderline his way.”