For the ballerina Beryl Goldwyn, who has died of cancer aged 91, there was something satisfying about beginning her career on the stage of the Royal Opera House with Margot Fonteyn in The Sleeping Beauty in 1946, and ending it with Sylvie Guillem in Don Quixote in 1993-94.
In these ballets she played minor roles – a mouse entering with Carabosse’s carriage and a Spanish woman – but in between she was a ballerina in her own right, acclaimed for her performances of Giselle. The critic Peter Williams noted that in Giselle’s mad scene, “it is possible to see the chill of death passing up her arms from her fingertips”. When she played the spirit in Act II, “her supernatural and ethereal qualities bore a certain resemblance to [Alicia] Markova” and, like Yvette Chauviré, “she brings something of the live Giselle to the novice Wili”.
Favourable comparison with these international stars was praise indeed and, although Goldwyn never earned international status, Richard Buckle’s comments about the bore of “traipsing out to Sadler’s Wells for an unknown Giselle [Goldwyn] and then Flash! Bam! Alacazam! – one is caught up and swept breathlessly along by the excitement of the melodrama …” speak volumes for her performances.
Goldwyn was typical of the dancers spotted by Marie Rambert, founder of Ballet Rambert, at the outset of their careers. Rambert would provide opportunities while bullying and cajoling them to become a ballerina. It was a tough, demanding life, as Rambert would incessantly “coach” her favoured stars, when travelling, when preparing to go onstage and even after a performance, but it paid off. Early in her career, too, Goldwyn was lucky to find a sympathetic partner in Alexander Bennett.
Initially she made an impression in the chamber ballets revived for Ballet at Eight, Rambert’s last performances at the tiny Mercury theatre in Notting Hill Gate. These introduced Goldwyn to the choreography of Walter Gore and Antony Tudor. In 1954 she danced nightly in Act I of Giselle at the Stoll theatre in London, as a curtain-raiser for Ingrid Bergman performing in Joan of Arc at the Stake, and she toured with Rambert in Europe, and to festivals at Jacob’s Pillow in the US and in the Roman ruins of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck, Lebanon.
On both the occasions that John Cranko choreographed for Rambert, he chose Goldwyn for leading roles; the Lady with her Shadow in Variations on a Theme (1955) and the Girl in Black in La Reja (1959). The American choreographer Robert Joffrey, too, was taken by Goldwyn and cast her as Taglioni in his Pas de Déesses (1955). Goldwyn was, indeed, a ballerina who could capture the essence of Romantic ballet.
But she also impressed in more modern works; it was said that in Movimientos, 1952, “she alone in the company seemed completely able to master the particular modern technique of Michael Charnley”. In 1958 Goldwyn starred as the sensitive Bride in Deryk Mendel’s experimental Platonist ballet Epithalame; the critic Clive Barnes described her as “fresh, lovely and radiant”.
Beryl was born in Pinner, Middlesex, the daughter of Louis Goldwyn, a chartered accountant from Australia, and his wife, Primrose (nee Lewis). At the age of three, she so obviously responded to music on the radio that her mother enrolled her at the local dancing school. She trained at the Sadler’s Wells school and, while still a student, had the opportunity to be on stage in 1946 for the reopening of the Royal Opera House after the second world war with The Sleeping Beauty.
From the Sadler’s Wells school, Goldwyn joined the Anglo-Polish Ballet, a wartime company initially established to provide employment for exiled Polish dancers. Six months later, the company folded, but not before Goldwyn had danced in their final season at the Saville theatre in the West End, in a repertory of Polish ballets such as Cracow Wedding and in the corps de ballet for Les Sylphides and Swan Lake Act II.
It was then that Goldwyn auditioned for Ballet Rambert, but the nucleus company was about to embark on what became an 18-month tour of Australia and New Zealand. Nevertheless, Rambert granted Goldwyn a scholarship to study at the school, with the promise of a place in the company on their return. For 18 months Goldwyn studied with Anna Ivanova and Mary Skeaping (both former dancers with Anna Pavlova’s company). She appeared as a fairy in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at Regent’s Park theatre in the summer of 1948, and was ready to join Rambert the following year.
She retired from the company in 1960, but retained a love of dance and the arts. For the Inner London Education Authority she taught ballet in evening classes in the 60s and 70s, and in the 90s she studied flamenco in Seville. She served as an artist’s model and took up painting, in 1991 exhibiting her work at the gallery in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
Goldwyn’s first marriage, in 1955, to Christopher Norwood, was short-lived. In 1969 she married Andrew Karney, a scientist and businessman. He survives her, as do their son, Peter, and two grandchildren, Adrian and Vivienne.
• Beryl Fleur Goldwyn, dancer, born 31 December 1930; died 11 October 2022
