Wendy Toye

Published: 6:02PM GMT twenty-eight February 2010

Previous of Images Next Photo: HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS Photo: EVERTT COLLECTION/REX Photo: HULTON GETTY

As a dancer Wendy Toye was already a seasoned maestro by the age of 14, when the good ballet dancer of the afterwards Vic-Wells Ballet (forerunner of the Royal Ballet), Alicia Markova, came to take a difficulty in the same gymnasium over a beer gymnasium nearby Holloway Prison.

The dual common the experience of a maestro entertainment childhood, and right away became close friends notwithstanding a seven-year age gap. Wendy Toye took piece in the initial Vic-Wells prolongation of Coppelia, and when Markova left the Vic-Wells Ballet with her partner, the distinguished Anton Dolin, they often took Wendy Toye with them on freelance jobs on the song gymnasium circuit, that was at that time the arch venue for ballet numbers outward London.

Sir Edward Downes Pina Bausch Royal Ballet: New Works at Linbury Studio Theatre, examination Flemming Flindt Hildegard Behrens

On one northern debate in 1932, Wendy Toye, Dolin and an additional dancer, Frederic Franklin, were pity a check with the stand up comic Billy Bennett, who told dirty jokes he was well well known as "Almost a Gentleman" and a woman snake-charmer. The 3 dancers would go on in the Cucaracha, to catcalls from the audience, quite destined at the men"s tights. The 15-year-old Wendy had to share a sauce room with the snake-charmer and a immeasurable python the room had to be intensively exhilarated for the snake.

In the same year, Wendy Toye was the youngest piece of of the association for a prolongation of Massine"s The Miracle. On the Markova-Dolin Company debate in 1934-35, she choreographed the prima ballerina"s first-ever � la mode ballet in soft dancing shoes, Aucassin and Nicolette, a story of banned love to song by the right away lost song gymnasium composer Josef "Joe" Holbrooke (known as "the cockney Wagner"). Unlike the company"s sponsor, a Mrs Henderson, Markova was gay at stealing her pointe shoes: "I had to have something not on pointe. I couldn"t do it for dual hours a night. It"s similar to a thespian you can"t strike high Cs all evening."

Having enjoyed a successful career as a actor and choreographer, Wendy Toye incited to directing and film-making. In the early 1950s she met the bard George K Arthur, who had paid for the movie rights to multiform short stories and was seeking for a befitting director.

When she voiced an seductiveness in The Stranger Left No Card, Arthur asked Wendy Toye to have it as a 23-minute short on a bill of �3,000. The design won the Best Fictional Short Film esteem at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and so tender the bard Alexander Korda that he offering her a director"s contract.

Her initial plan for Korda was In the Picture, an piece of Three Cases of Murder (1953) starring Orson Welles as Lord Mountdrago. Although Wendy Toye felt small unrestrained for crime stories, she went on to approach The Teckman Mystery (1954), created by Francis Durbridge and starring Margaret Leighton and John Justin.

Her subsequent movie plan was a done at home comedy, Raising A Riot (1955), that warranted vicious and renouned acclaim, followed by an additional jaunty picture, this time with a Yuletide theme, On the Twelfth Daye_SLps (1955) that perceived an Oscar assignment in the Best Short Subject category.

When Korda died in Jan 1956, Wendy Toye"s stipulate was taken over by the Rank Corporation.

Wendy Toye was innate on May 1 1917 in London. When she was 3 she gave her initial performance, at the Royal Albert Hall as a piece of of a youthful dance troupe. Her piece for one person spin as piece of the action captivated far-reaching attention, and by the time she was five, she was operative in song halls as a "stooge" for Hayden Coffin, a maestro of Edwardian low-pitched comedies.

Under the superintendence of her mother, Wendy grown a crowd of behaving talents, precision with Euphen MacLaren, Tamara Karsavina, Anton Dolin, Morosoff, Nicholas Legat and Marie Rambert. When she was 9 she choreographed a ballet set to the song of Scarlatti at the London Palladium, and done her initial maestro coming in 1929 as Peasblossom in A Midsummer Night"s Dream at the Old Vic.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she appeared in majority renouned theatre shows, together with Toad of Toad Hall (1931), The Golden Toy (1934), Tulip Time (1935), Strike it Again (1944) and Follow the Girls (1945). As a piece of of Dame Ninette de Valois" strange Vic Wells Ballet and the British Ballet, organized by Adeline Gene, she additionally toured with Anton Dolin"s Ballet. She was invited to dance with Serge Diaghilev"s Ballet Russe, and met the bard and film-maker Jean Cocteau.

As well as dancing principal purposes with these companies, Wendy Toye additionally choreographed short ballets, and, in between 1935 and 1942, devised dance sequences for majority shows and films. These enclosed theatre routines for the Crazy Gang at the London Palladium and majority of George Black"s low-pitched productions, majority particularly Black Velvet (1939), in that she was additionally the principal dancer.

In New York in 1949 she destined a Broadway prolongation of Peter Pan, starring Boris Karloff and Jean Arthur.

She done her initial movie coming as a dancer at the age of fourteen in 1931 in Anthony Asquith"s Dance Pretty Lady, and in 1935 featured in Paul Merzbach"s Invitation to the Waltz. These small tools kindled an seductiveness in the technical aspects of film-making, and in 1942 she organised the dances for The Young Mr Pitt, destined by Carol Reed. In 1946 she was the choreographer on Piccadilly Incident, a wartime intrigue starring Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding and destined by Herbert Wilcox.

As a movie executive in the 1950s, Wendy Toye was unhappy not to be offering some-more desirous element by Rank, but took good honour in never going over budget. Her success in the British movie industry, at a time when it was dominated by men, is pronounced to have desirous alternative women directors to come in the field.

In the 1970s she changed in to television, directing a accumulation of dramas, including, in 1982, a reconstitute of The Stranger Left No Card as piece of the renouned Tales of the Unexpected array for Anglia. In 1986 she was join forces with bard on the radio movie Barnum! starring Michael Crawford, and one after another operative in theatre, movie and radio until the mid-1990s.

Wendy Toye destined her initial theatre prolongation in 1948, and went on to approach As You Like It at the Old Vic in 1959, Showboat (1971) and Bless the Bride at the Adelphi, Robert and Elizabeth (1964) at the Lyric Theatre, and the operas Bluebeard"s Castle and Die Fledermaus at both Sadler"s Wells and the Coliseum. In 1992 she destined a reconstruction of The Sound of Music, starring Liz Robertson, at Sadler"s Wells, and in 1994 a jubilee of the work of Flanders and Swann, Under Their Hats.

She lectured continually in Australia, and from 1978 was an confidant for the Arts Council.

She was awarded the Queen"s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977 and allocated CBE in 1992. She defended her glorious and disagreeable clarity of humour in to old age.

Wendy Toye"s matrimony to Edward Sharp finished in divorce.