Lynn Seymour

Lynn Seymour will go down in the history of the first fifty years of the Royal Ballet as the greatest dramatic dancer of that era,” wrote Dame Ninette de Valois, former director of the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, in the foreword to a 1980 biography about the world-famous Canadian dancer.

Lynn Springbett was born at Wainwright, Alberta, but the family later moved to Victoria and then to Vancouver. At six she began dancing lessons in Victoria where one of her teachers was astonished at the aptitude and speed with which she learned new steps. Later, in Vancouver, Lynn was taught by Nicolai Svetlanoff, formerly with Russia’s Imperial Ballet School, who admired her for the “creative intelligence she brought to the dance.”

The first-prize winner in the solo dance competitions of the Vancouver Ballet Society for three straight years, Lynn, at 14, was selected to dance at the Canadian Ballet Festival in Ottawa in 1953. She so impressed choreographer Mary McBirney that the latter arranged an audition with Dame Ninette de Valois who was visiting Vancouver later that year. The result: Lynn won a scholarship for the next school year.

Lynn Seymour's professional career is captured in a Nielsen-Ferns Ltd. production called Lynn Seymour: In a Class of Her Own (1979) and features the Alberta-born, internationally acclaimed ballet star with a number of her partners including Christopher Gable, David Wall, Stephen Jerreries, Weiner Dietrich, and Rudolph Nureyev. [Photo, courtesy the Archives of the National Ballet of Canada]

At the Sadler’s Wells School in London, Lynn continued to impress. In 1956, she had her first small role in a Cambridge student production of Orpheus and Euridice. Her partner for that performance was another student, Christopher Gable. (Their partnership continued for years and brought much fame to both.)

As a member of the Sadler’s Wells Touring Company, she danced as a soloist after only three months. By then, the principal choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan, insisted, along with Dame Ninette, that Lynn change her name. While her family didn’t like her selection, her next letter to them showed, on her return address, the surname “Seymour.”

Her first appearance at Covent Garden in The Burrow brought critical acclaim, one review calling her “an especially beautiful dancer.” At 19, she was selected to play Odette/Odile in Swan Lake with the Touring Company at Melbourne, Australia, where guest artist Robert Helpmann, the ballet star and actor in the movie Red Shoes, later recalled her appearance as “one of the most exciting scenes I have ever seen, a young, powerful, dramatic actress as well as a beautiful dancer.”

A later performance in Swan Lake at Covent Garden won critical acclaim in London. Vancouver papers were so lyrical it embarrassed her. Later that year, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where Martha Graham, the great dancer and choreographer, turned to Dame Ninette and exclaimed, “It’s not fair: she’s got it all!”

With MacMillan as her principal choreographer, Lynn starred in a number of ballets, among them The Invitation and The Two Pigeons. In 1961, she toured Japan, Hong Kong, and Manila and, the following year, Hamburg, West Berlin, and Copenhagen. In 1963, Lynn returned to New York to perform in Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Symphony before going to Vancouver for two performances and marriage to a young Englishman.

In 1964, Romeo and Juliet and Images of Love were added to her repertoire and scenes from them were televised by the CBC that September. Rudolph Nureyev performed with her and with Gable, and, wrote Ronald Austin in 1980, she and Nureyev became a kind of “fan club for each other.” “I love his (Nureyev’s) total honesty about his work, honest in a way I’ve never seen before,” Lynn is quoted in Austin’s biography, while Nureyev called her “the most promising of all the young dancers in the world today.” This was a view confirmed when, in New York in 1965, Lynn and Gable received 22 curtain calls for their Romeo and Juliet and an effusive review in Vogue that ended, “Neither dancer fills a balletic cliché. They simply break hearts.”

Tours throughout Europe and America continued through the mid-’60s, with Lynn appearing as a guest artist with the National Ballet of Canada in Washington in 1966. Later, when MacMillan went to Opera Berlin to become its director, she joined him there as a principal ballerina, staying three years and making guest appearances with other companies. When MacMillan returned to London as director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in 1970, she returned to London with her twin sons by her second marriage. She appeared once more with Nureyev in Glen Tetley’s production of Laborintus but, on remarrying and having a third son in 1974, she seriously considered retirement.

By January 1975, however, she returned to Covent Garden to new applause as a mature artist and followed this with more raves for her role as “a swoony girl drooling over Chopin” in Jerome Robbin’s ballet, Concert. And after more performances on the continent, she returned, at age 36, to Covent Garden again to perform Juliet. In New York after a four-year absence, she appeared in Sir Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country. The reviews saluted her as one of the great dancers of our time. The next year she was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

A third-generation Canadian on both sides of her family, the prairie-born Lynn Seymour maintains her Canadian citizenship to this day even though she left her native land more than 40 years ago.