Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World

Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World, was a BBC TV film based on the life of the American dancer Isadora Duncan first broadcast on 22 September 1966. The film was written by Sewell Stokes and the director Ken Russell and starred Vivian Pickles and Peter Bowles.

Sewell Stokes became friendly with the dancer towards the very end of her life when she was penniless and alone. In 1928 he wrote a memoir of his conversations with her, shortly after her death, entitled Isadora, an Intimate Portrait. Two years after the first broadcast of the TV film, Vanessa Redgrave played the role of Isadora Duncan in the big-screen biopic Isadora.

Russell's biographer Joseph Lanza believes that "of all his television work, Isadora is his most accomplished". It explores his "ongoing theme of art being a thing of both glory and vulgarity"^[1]

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