Stanley Holden

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Stanley Holden, born Stanley Waller, (January 27, 1928–May 11, 2007) was a British American ballet dancer and choreographer.

Born in London, he joined the Royal Ballet in 1944 and won notice for performing numerous character roles, especially "Widow Simone" in the 1960 production of Fille Mal Gardée by Frederick Ashton. After retiring in 1969, he moved to California to teach and perform.^[1]

He died from heart disease and colon cancer in Thousand Oaks, California.^[2] He is survived by a wife and three daughters from a previous marriage. ^[3]

Stanley Waller (Stanley Holden), dancer and teacher: born London 27 January 1928; married first Stella Farrance (one son, two daughters), second 1970 Judy Landon (one stepdaughter); died Thousand Oaks, California 11 May 2007.

Stanley Holden was much-loved as a character dancer with the Royal Ballet, especially in humorous roles. He will be best remembered as the overwrought, exasperated but ultimately warm-hearted Widow Simone in Frederick Ashton's La Fille mal gardée.

This travesti part, created on him, exploited his gift for faceted, rounded portraiture. It has become one of the most popular and distinctive roles of the Royal Ballet's repertoire, performed with great success by many of Holden's successors. But none has been entirely able to equal his mix of acerbity and affection; or to emulate the way he combined comedy with humanity and so always avoided ridicule; or to perform the celebrated clog dance with the same show-stopping comic timing and musicality; or to hit that precariously borderline note of being a man playing a woman, but without the exaggerated effeminacy that would have tipped the role into a drag act. It was in this role that, in 1969, Holden formally retired from the Royal Ballet, giving a farewell performance that earned him a 25-minute standing ovation.

Born Stanley Waller in the East End of London in 1928, he was the youngest of eight children. His mother, he told an American newspaper in 2001, pushed him into showbusiness. Aged 13, he started his dance training at the Bush Davies School, paying for his classes by winning money at the snooker table. He was then accepted into the Sadler's Wells School.

Aged 16, he joined the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) where he made his professional début as a Glasgow street boy in the premiere of Robert Helpmann's Miracle in the Gorbals. Two years later, when the company reopened the Royal Opera House after the Second World War with their new production of The Sleeping Beauty, Stanley Holden (as he became) was given the small featured part of Puss in Boots.

Shortly after, however, he was called up for military service. Returning to ballet in 1948, he was assigned to the smaller company - the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet - which had been formed at Sadler's Wells after the first company's move to the Royal Opera House. He arrived in time at the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet for Andrée Howard to include him in a ballet she was making, Selina, a parody of romantic ballet. In this he created the role of the witch, Agnes, and, notwithstanding the enforced break in his performing career, he was an immediate comedy hit.

In 1951, he made three important débuts, each displaying his gift for vividly individual and nuanced characterisation. He created the role of Pierrot in John Cranko's Harlequin in April, blending comedy with pathos. In Ninette de Valois's The Prospect Before Us, the company star Robert Helpmann as the drunken Mr O'Reilly was a hard act to follow, but Holden did, perfectly.

And he played his first Dr Coppelius in Coppélia, a role to which he brought his own distinctive stamp, finding a truthful depth in the old eccentric dollmaker's character. The critic John Percival points out it was Holden who invented the joke that now often features in other interpretations: Coppelius carefully dusting off and folding his jacket after a tussle with intruders - and then forgetfully tossing it to the floor.

From 1954 to 1957 he was in South Africa, teaching. Back in England, he was taken into the main company, by now renamed the Royal Ballet, at the Royal Opera House. Ashton created the role of the pipe-smoking, bicycle-riding Stewart Powell in Enigma Variations on him. He took on roles in the existing Ashton repertoire, such as the overly suave Dago in Façade, Bottom in The Dream and each of the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. And, of course, he continued playing the Widow Simone.

In 1970, soon after retiring from the Royal Ballet, he moved to Los Angeles to accept the post of Director of the Academy of Dance at the Music Center. The following year he left to open the Stanley Holden Dance Center in the city. His studio became a magnet not only for apprentice dancers, but for celebrated professionals: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Gelsey Kirkland all went there when American Ballet Theatre was on tour.

Occasionally, Holden came out of retirement to stage ballets or perform. He danced Coppelius with the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1978 and Widow Simone with the Joffrey Ballet in 1986-87. In 1989 he choreographed a comic ballet, Dmitri, based on a Woody Allen story, for the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, and revived it for the Pacific Inland Ballet last year.

Heart surgery in 1980 and 1996 had forced Holden to cut down on his activities; but he remained a man of great enthusiasm and warm spontaneity. In 1997 he closed the Stanley Holden Dance Center and gave classes instead at the California Dance Theatre in Agoura Hills.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Profile of Stanley Holden Dance Center