DeMille, Agnes George (1909-1993)

US dancer and choreographer. She introduced popular dance idioms into ballet with such works as Rodeo (1942). One of the most significant contributors to the American Ballet Theater, with dramatic ballets like Fall River Legend (1948), based on the Lizzie Borden murder case, she also led the change on Broadway to new-style musicals with her choreography of Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and others.

DeMille studied ballet with Marie Rambert in the UK, dancing in ballets and musicals in Europe before making her debut as a choreographer in the USA.

Early life She was born in New York, the daughter of William C DeMille, a playwright, and the niece of film director Cecil B DeMille. When she was ten, she appeared in one of her father's film productions, Ragamuffin 1915. She went to local ballet schools and studied English at the University of California. After giving a solo recital in New York 1928, she set off for London to study classical ballet with Marie Rambert, Theodore Koslov, and Anthony Tudor, but was already too old to become a classical ballet dancer.

Early work She choreographed Cole Porter's Nymph Errant, produced in London 1933, and created the dances for Cecil B DeMille's film Cleopatra the following year. She choreographed for the American Ballet Theater's very first season 1940. Her first triumph though was Rodeo 1942, to music composed by Aaron Copland, for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, who were based in New York during World War II. She herself danced the leading role of a girl who masquerades as a cowboy to win her boyfriend's heart.

Musicals Rodeo led directly to her next success, for the songwriters Rodgers and Hammerstein had seen the ballet and engaged her for Oklahoma!. Many other Broadway hits followed; among them Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus 1943, Harold Arlen's Bloomer Girl 1944, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel 1945, Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon 1947, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1949, and Paint Your Wagon 1951.

Agnes DeMille Dance Theater She founded the Agnes DeMille Dance Theater 1953 and danced in her own most popular ballets. Her last ballet, The Other, was shown on television 1992.

Books Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as well as creating new ballets, she wrote several books on dance. She also wrote four autobiographical books: Dance to the Piper 1952, And Promenade Home 1959, Speak to Me, Dance with Me 1973, and Where the Wings Grow 1978.

Importance One of the most influential choreographers of her time, DeMille brought together the two worlds of the classical ballet and the musical. Through her work, which followed the main ballet tradition, though with truly remarkable consequences, US dance gained its inimitable sense of uninhibited freedom.