Lynn Seymour, who has died aged 83, was one of the greatest dramatic ballerinas of the 20th century. In addition to her career with the Royal Ballet and at Berlin Opera Ballet she danced as a guest with companies including the National Ballet of Canada, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Second Stride and Adventures in Motion Pictures.
She choreographed several short-lived ballets and was artistic director of the Ballet of Bavarian State Opera, Munich (1978-80), and the Greek National Ballet (2006-07). An independent figure, she liked to investigate many dance forms: Matthew Bourne described her as rare in being “completely accepted by the whole world of dance”.
Most widely known as a muse for Kenneth MacMillan, Seymour was a dancer of individuality with fine musicality and in all the roles she created left a high benchmark for successors to try to emulate. She was noted for a fluidity that MacMillan in 1980 said made her “movements melt one into the next”. He added that “Lynn is as real as anyone can be on stage when wearing pointe shoes.”
Beginning with the small but conspicuous role of the Adolescent in The Burrow, MacMillan thrust Seymour into the limelight in 1958, and two years later created two contrasting roles for her, the Fiancée in Le Baiser de la Fée and the Young Girl in The Invitation. This role was controversial as it showed a girl flattered by an older man’s attention raped and traumatised – on stage at Covent Garden.
Seymour created leading roles in three of MacMillan’s acclaimed multi-act ballets, Romeo and Juliet (1965), Anastasia (1967, 1971) and Mayerling (1978). Seymour and her on-stage partner Christopher Gable had joined MacMillan’s inner circle, fascinated by the arts and theatre of the 1960s. In Romeo, MacMillan wanted to repeat the youthfulness of Franco Zeffirelli’s staging of the play at the Old Vic in 1960, and make Juliet the driving force of his ballet.
It was traumatic for the trio when, at the insistence of the US impresario Sol Hurok, the first performances in London and New York were given to Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. This was particularly so for Seymour, who had had an abortion to ensure that nothing interfered with her career.
In 1966 she went with MacMillan to the Berlin Opera Ballet. There she was terrific as the distraught Anna Anderson in the Berlin hospital trying to convince that she was the tsar’s youngest daughter in the expressionist one-act version of Anastasia (1967). MacMillan then added two earlier acts for the Royal Ballet (1971): as the tomboy real Anastasia, Seymour roller-skated on to the stage and matured as a young princess at a state ball. While some of Seymour’s roles are recorded on film, her performance as Anastasia is encapsulated in Anthony Crickmay’s powerful photographs of the ballet.
Frederick Ashton loved to give Seymour quick detailed steps to show her marvellous, expressive feet and to display her flowing upper body. He gave her more romantic roles in The Two Pigeons (1962) and as the bored, capricious Natalia Petrovna hoping for a last love in A Month in the Country (1976). In his Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan she evoked the famous barefoot dancer as Ashton remembered her. That work found its five-waltz form in 1976, and that year, too, came her appointment as CBE.
Seymour was less happy dancing the exposed ballerina roles in classics including Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, although she was an interesting Giselle. In the 70s Nureyev, a friend with whom she loved to dance, helped her to gain confidence in these roles. She worked with many choreographers and was memorable in Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries (1976) and in Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (1970) and his comic The Concert (1975).
In 1981 Seymour retired from the Royal Ballet on the eve of what was to be a comeback after injuries and ill-health, but it was not the end of her career. She briefly created the rock dance Seymour’s Circus and was persuaded by Gable, then running Northern Ballet, to create Lowry’s Mother in Gillian Lynne’s A Simple Man (1987).
In 1988 she returned to ballet as a memorable Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin with London Festival Ballet and the next year danced a full repertory with the company, from the Sugar Plum Fairy to reprising Anna Anderson. In 1996 she asked to play the Queen in Bourne’s Swan Lake and the following year created the Stepmother, inspired by Bette Davis, in his Cinderella.
Seymour was born Berta Lynn Springbett – MacMillan advised the name change – in Wainwright, Alberta, Canada, to Marjorie (nee McIvor), and Ed Springbett, a dentist. Inspired by seeing Alexandra Danilova in Coppélia and the 1948 film The Red Shoes, she trained with Nicholas Svetlanoff in Vancouver, where she was spotted at an audition in 1953 by Ashton, and offered a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells ballet school.
There her most important teacher was the former Pavlova dancer Winifred Edwards. In 1956 she graduated into the Royal Ballet companies, where she was nurtured by Peter Wright and MacMillan and almost immediately took on soloist roles. Nonetheless, she struggled with a supple, voluptuous body with soft muscles not designed for dance.
In 1963 she married Colin Jones, a dancer turned photographer; in 1979, another photographer, Philip Pace; and in 1983, Vanya Hackle, a rock group agent. All ended in divorce.
She had three sons, who survive her: twins, Adrian and Jerzy, with the Polish dancer Eike Walcz, and Damian, with Pace.
• Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 8 March 1939; died 7 March 2023
