Anne Ditchburn

Anne Ditchburn (born October 4, 1949) is a Canadian ballet dancer, choreographer, and film actress, headlining films like 1979's Slow Dancing in the Big City as a dancer with a crippling disease, a film directed by Rocky director John G. Avildsen and co-starring Paul Sorvino . She also played the doomed ballet dancer Laurian Summers in the 1983 cult horror film Curtains with John Vernon and Samantha Eggar. She danced in nearly all of her film credits, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work in Slow Dancing in the Big City. In her time with the National she choreographed some of its most disguished pieces of the 1970s, including Mad Shadows and Kisses, while also heading side company Ballet Revue.

Ditchburn was born on October 4, 1949, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. When she was three, her father moved her, her mother, and her four siblings to Mississauga. Sensing a natural flair for dancing in his daughter, Ditchburn's father began enrolling her in private lessons with Janet Baldwin, who helped her attain her a role in her first major ballet when she was 11, as "Gold" in a 1961 production of Hungarian. Baldwin trained her until she was fourteen, when the instructor suggested she audition for the National Ballet School, something Ditchburn later stated was "the best experience of [her] life". Her first public ballet was at age 19, when the then National Ballet of Canada artistic director and founder Celia Franca decided to produce Ditchburn's own Brown Earth.

Ditchburn was a notable member of the National Ballet of Canada from 1967 to 1979, where she worked as both a dancer and a prominent choreographer (one of the few females to do so). She was influenced by the then artistic director Alexander Grant, as well as fellow ballerina Karen Kain.

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