Adam Cooper talks to Natalie Steed to introduce this inteview with the dancer, director and choreographer Wendy Toye.

It begins with Wendy Toye’s memory of chatting to Sergei Diaghilev at the age of 9, giving her opinion of L’Après-Midi d’un faune, and the pace never stops. She tells Patricia Linton of her love for dancing of all sorts. From the age of 5 she performed in Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall. At 14 she became a member of the Vic-Wells Ballet, while dancing commercially as well. She speaks of touring in Denmark, with Adeleine Genée leading the company, and being singled out by the Prince of Wales. Her career, in the 1930s and subsequently, involved films, shows, cabaret and television, as well as ballet, opera and choreography. At the age of 90 she reflects on how she worked in so many fields, not, as she says, peaking in any of them, but having enjoyed all of it and all of them.

Wendy Toye was born in Clapton in 1917, and very early showed considerable balletic and theatrical talent. As a child she was often appearing on the stage, as well as taking serious ballet lessons from Tamara Karsavina, among others. She won the European Charleston Championship at the age of 9. In 1931, she joined the Vic-Wells Ballet Company, though continuing to work in cabaret. She then worked for the Markova-Dolin Company from 1934-5, and choreographed the ballet Aucassin and Nicolette for them. In 1937, partly as a result of an appendix operation, she ceased to dance in ballet, and embarked on her long, distinguished and industrious career in the commercial theatre, films and television, as actress, dancer, choreographer and director (which, in her later years, included directing a number of operas, particularly for Sadler’s Wells/English National Opera). Wendy Toye was appointed CBE in 1992 for services to the arts. She died in Hillingdon in 2010.

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