Maryon Lane
| Maryon Lane | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Patricia Mills 15 February 1931 Zululand, South Africa |
| Died | 13 June 2008 (aged 77) Kyrenia, Cyprus |
| Occupation | Ballet dancer |
| Spouse(s) | David Blair |
Maryon Lane (15 February 1931 – 13 June 2008) was a South African ballet dancer who became well known in England as a ballerina of the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet and as a soloist with the Royal Ballet.
Maryon Lane was born as Patricia Mills in Zululand, a district of Natal province (now KwaZulu-Natal) on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. When she was about 13 years old, in 1944, her family took her to Johannesburg, in the northern province of Transvaal (now Gauteng). There she studied with the best ballet teachers in the city, including Marjorie Sturman, a specialist in the Cecchetti method, and Reina Berman, who had been trained by Cecchetti principles before switching to the syllabus of the Royal Academy of Dancing (RAD). In 1946, soon after World War II had ended and peace had returned to Europe, Mills left South Africa and immigrated to England, having won an RAD scholarship to attend the Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London. After only a year's tuition there, she was taken into the corps of the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet. It was at this point that she adopted her professional name. The company then included a South African dancer named Patricia Miller, so a name change from Patricia Mills was essential: Maryon Lane, distinctively spelled, was her choice.
The Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet was then a small, young troupe founded by Ninette de Valois to nurture dancers and choreographers after the parent company, the Sadler's Wells Ballet, became resident at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Owing to the need to replenish the depleted roster of leading dancers, Lane rose rapidly through the ranks. By 1948, at age 17, she had been named a principal dancer and was appearing in prominent roles in works by de Valois and Frederick Ashton, the chief choreographer of the company. Petite, with dark hair, a pretty, oval face, and ideal proportions, she possessed a vivid personality, a firm technique, and an innate musicality. De Valois considered her the type of dancer that was most valuable of all: not a great star but a repertory dancer capable of demi-caractère and dramatic work as well as the purely classical.
Throughout her career, Lane was admired for her musicality, attack, and sheer domination of the stage. In repertory works, she displayed great charm in such lighthearted roles as Swanilda in Coppélia, Lise in Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardée, and the title characters in John Cranko's Pineapple Poll and Léonide Massine's Mam'zelle Angot, but she was also effective as the vapid Ballerina in Michel Fokine's Petrushka, as the Betrayed Girl in de Valois's The Rake's Progress, and as the adulterous, runaway Bride in Alfred Rodrigues's Blood Wedding. She was praised for her execution of the notoriously demanding and often unrewarding fairy variations in the prologue to The Sleeping Beauty as well as for her performance as the Princess Aurora, the title role. Her greatest contribution at the time, however, was the part she played in the creation of new ballets, in particular those of the young Kenneth MacMillan.
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