Harry Haythorne

Harry Haythorne, MBE (7 October 1926 – 24 November 2014) was an Australian dancer, ballet master, artistic director, and teacher who performed in vaudeville, musicals, and ballet companies in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Australia. He was assistant artistic director of the Scottish Ballet (1969–1974) and artistic director of the Queensland Ballet (1975–1978) and the Royal New Zealand Ballet (1981–1992).

Harry Neville Haythorne was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the child of an English father and an Australian mother of Irish descent. Both his parents, who had met at a local dance hall, loved ballroom dancing, but they were barred from many venues in Adelaide because they dared to introduce what Haythorne jokingly referred to in an interview as "filthy foreign dances" such as the foxtrot and the quickstep. His father had brought these dance styles with him when he migrated from England to Australia. They were unknown at the time in Adelaide.

Haythorne began his dance training with Jean Bedford, who taught "operatic dancing," and shortly afterward enrolled in tap dancing classes with Herbert Noye. His initial ambitions were to go into vaudeville. Even with the visits of the Ballets Russes companies to Australia in the 1930s, which was an exciting time for him, he still did not have ambitions to take up ballet seriously.

When Haythorne was fourteen, he began his professional performing career with Harold Raymond's Varieties, a vaudeville troupe established initially as a concert party to entertain troops as World War II began. With Harold Raymond, he took part in comedy sketches, played his piano accordion, sang songs, and danced. His star act, which would feature again much later in his life, was his tap dancing routine on roller skates.

During the last months of World War II, Haythorne joined the Royal Australian Air Force and remained in the defence forces for two years. After being discharged, he resumed his dancing career. In the late 1940s, he took ballet classes from the Adelaide teacher Joanna Priest and performed in her South Australian Ballet. However, it was seeing performances by Ballet Rambert during its Australasian tour (1947–1949) that inspired him to change direction and look to ballet as a career.

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