Hermione Darnborough

Hermione Maria Louise Darnborough (1915 – 29 October 2010), later Hermione Mathieson, was an English principal ballerina who made her name at Sadler's Wells in the 1930s. She retired at a young age after marrying the conductor and composer Muir Mathieson.

Hermione Darnborough came from a wealthy and well-connected family in Weybridge, Surrey. On the side of her "glamorous and determined" mother, Frances, she was a cousin of the Duke of Argyll and the Duke of Portland. Her American father, Bill (or Billy) Darnborough (1869–1958), a former minor league baseball player and chop house owner who amassed a small fortune at roulette in the early years of the twentieth century, has been described as "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, though ... [l]ike many an habitual gambler, he would generally lose his winnings at the next turn of the wheel, and it took all his wife's pleading to persuade him to stop". Her brother was the film producer Antony Darnborough (1913–2000), whose sister-in-law, journalist Drusilla Beyfus, married theatre critic Milton Shulman and was mother of Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue since 1992, and Nicola Shulman, later Marchioness of Normanby.

In 1929, at the age of 14, Darnborough auditioned for the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev during the final season that the highly influential Ballets Russes performed in London. He was evidently impressed and asked to see her again in three years time, but nothing came of this as he died a few weeks later in Venice.

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