Her parents were William C. de Mille, a Broadway playwright and screen writer, and Anna George de Mille, a daughter of Henry George, the social reformer, economist and single-tax advocate. The next year, she staged "Three Virgins and a Devil," a lusty comedy set in the Middle Ages that was based on a sketch she had created for a London revue in 1934; the piece has often been revived by Ballet Theater. The choreographer treated the darker side of American history in "The Four Marys," a poignant tale of miscegenation in the days of slavery, and in "Fall River Legend," which was based on the 19th-century murder trial of Lizzie Borden, the shy Massachusetts woman accused of murdering her father and stepmother. Her ballet The Informer (1988) used Marc Blitztein's music from Juno and dealt with Irish-British conflicts between 1917 and 1921 with only the Irish seen on stage, their opponents being suggested through the gestures of the dancers. Miss de Mille continued to create works for American Ballet Theater, including "Tally-Ho" (1944), "Fall River Legend" (1948), "The Harvest According" (1952), "Rib of Eve" (1956), "Sebastian" (1957), "The Wind in the Mountains" and "The Four Marys" (both 1965), "A Rose for Miss Emily" (1971) and "Texas Fourth" (1976). With the aid of rehabilitative therapy and her own enormous willpower, she recovered sufficiently to continue her career, learning to write with her left hand in the process. We just want to experience it. Agnes De Mille. In her long career, Miss de Mille proved equally at home on Broadway and on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. The result was one of the greatest hits in the history of American musical comedy: "Oklahoma!" But she never gave up her desire to dance. One of her most striking creations of recent years, "The Informer" was unusual because, although the Irish rebels were visible on stage, their English opponents were not. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Biographer Carol Easton (Jacqueline du Pre, CH, Oct'90; The Search for Sam Goldwyn, CH, Jul'76; and Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton, CH, Feb'74) brings a practiced researcher's skills to this work on de Mille. Also in 1941, Miss de Mille choreographed "Drums Sound in Hackensack" for the Ballets Jooss, a modern-dance company. De Mille was born in 1905 in New York, where her father, William, was a successful playwright. She had little sympathy for the experimental abstract choreography of Merce Cunningham, and in "America Dances," a history published in 1981, she called Twyla Tharp's choreography "tiresomely neurotic. Wife of Walter Foy Prude. Instead, she struggled in obscurity and poverty, courageously pursuing a career as a dancer and choreographer. This includes data values and the controlled vocabularies that house them. Just as a revue sketch turned into "Three Virgins and a Devil," so bits of solos she had created in the 30's on Western themes were incorporated into "Rodeo." This was especially true of the principal choreographic sequence, "Laurey Makes Up Her Mind," in which the work's heroine was shown torn between two suitors. She is known for her work on Oklahoma! I tell a story, and I tell it well.' shelved 981 times. The lovingly, seamlessly staged evening, put together by Sallie Wilson and Agnes George de Mille died in 1988. Death: 1978 (65-74) New York, NY, United States (cancer) Immediate Family: Daughter of William Churchill Demille and Anna Angela deMille Wife of Richard Alan Miller Ex-wife of Bernard P Fineman Sister of Agnes George de Mille Half sister of Richard DeMille. Partly it's greed, but mainly it's curiosity. With an original score by Aaron Copland and scenery by Oliver Smith, "Rodeo" told a story about Western ranch life. She died of a stroke on October 7, 1993, in New York City at the age of 88. Her first great popular success, however, came in 1942 when she choreographed "Rodeo" for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The niece of prominent Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille and the daughter of screenwriter and director William C. DeMille, she grew up in New York City. A. de Mille Celebration, a gem of a program presented by the New York Theatre Ballet on Friday night at Florence Gould Hall was a welcome attempt at giving de Mille the honor she deserves. The Theatre Guild, who were preparing a new musical called Away We Go, suggested de Mille to the composers Rodgers and Hammerstein who saw Rodeo and - despite qualms on the part of Rodgers - hired her for what was to become Oklahoma]. Agnes de Mille. Her ballets ranged from "Rodeo," a comic and sentimental evocation of the Old West, to "Fall River Legend," a psychological study of Lizzie Borden. Speaking at the 50th-anniversary gala of American Ballet Theater, in January 1990 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Miss de Mille tried to distill the essence of American dance in these words: "Ours is an up beat, a hurried, hasty beat. a year later, died … She returned to the United States permanently in 1939 and the following year was invited to choreograph for the first season of the newly formed Ballet Theatre (later the American Ballet Theatre). She was never satisfied with its ending. The book is wonderful and talks about the crime and the ballet that Agnes De Mille created. This is glory on earth. De Mille was married to Walter Prude, a manager of concert artists, from 1943 until his death in 1988. Her next show One Touch Of Venus (1943), about a statue that comes to life in modern-day Manhattan, gave her scope for two imaginative ballet sequences, while Bloomer Girl (1944) incorporated a controversial and starkly symbolic Civil War ballet. Agnes De Mille came from a driven and successful family: her maternal grandfather was the world renown economist, Henry George. sort by. Read 3 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Having become an established figure in the musical theater, she proceeded to choreograph such shows as "Carousel" (1945); "Allegro" (1947), which she directed as well as choreographed; "Brigadoon" (1947); "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1949); "Paint Your Wagon" (1951); "The Girl in Pink Tights" (1954); "Goldilocks" (1958); "Juno" (1959); "Kwamina" (1961), and "110 in the Shade" (1963). While her sister attended college, Miss de Mille tried to find theatrical work. "Rodeo," like such other Americana ballets of the period as "Billy the Kid" and "Filling Station," therefore countered the arguments of those fanatical modern dancers who maintained that ballet was an art of the courts of Europe that could never flourish in democratic America. Agnes de Mille. Viewing dance as a theatrical and expressive art, Miss de Mille stressed motivated gestures rather than niceties of classical style in her choreography and in her coaching of dancers. Commenting on Miss de Mille's choreography, Anna Kisselgoff, the chief dance critic of The New York Times, observed that happiness in one of these Americana ballets tended to be symbolized by "a set of girls in party dresses being lifted by clean-cut young men. Her own fascination is communicated even as she claws up the curtain to show the wretched conditions our dancers work under, the backstage back-biting, and the abysmal financial insecurity that faces even the top dancers. Agnes de Mille’s dances are seldom performed these days, 13 years after her death. Agnes George de Mille, dancer and choreographer: born New York City 18 September 1905; married 1943 Walter Prude (died 1988; one son); died New York City 7 October 1993. With infectious music by Aaron Copland, and de Mille herself dancing the leading role of a girl who masquerades as a wrangler to win her cowboy boyfriend, its blend of balletic movements with those of the hoedown and square-dance received 22 curtain calls. She Felt Destined To Be an Artist. Agnes would die on February 11, 1894, at the age of three from spinal meningitis. Determined to dance, and encouraged by her mother, she studied at local ballet schools, then moved to New York to gain experience ('often in third-rate night clubs') as a performer, specialising in dramatic self-choreographed character sketches to camouflage her limited classical abilities. As a result, they emerge as people and not as automata -- warm and believable people made larger than life and more endearing by the formalized movement through which they project themselves. In contrast, she said of dancing: 'You are out of yourself, larger and more potent, more beautiful . What made Miss de Mille's contributions to "Oklahoma!" The following year she choreographed a revival of The Black Crook, in Hoboken, but, aware of her limitations, she then went to Europe and for six years studied with Theodore Koslov, Marie Rambert and Anthony Tudor. Dr. This is power. For her, bodily movement was a form of communication akin to speech. (Her courtship and marriage are described in her autobiographical work, And Promenade Home, and in Martha. ) American dancers increasingly filled its ranks and it wished to demonstrate that it had become a part of American cultural life. Miss de Mille was proudly American in her tastes and artistic allegiances. Arnold Haskell, the leading British critic of the day, called her "the first real idiomatic American dancer" he had seen. In 1975 a stroke left Agnes de Mille partially paralysed, and her husband of 45 years, the artists' agent Walter Prude, died five years ago. De Mille, is known world over for his movie directing. Miss de Mille's childhood was spent partly in New York City, where her father wrote plays for the Broadway producer David Belasco, and partly in a summer colony called Merriewold in Sullivan County, N.Y. Miss de Mille described life at this vacation site for writers and theater people in her memoir "Where the Wings Grow," in which she recalled how, as a girl, she danced by herself in the woods and felt that she was destined to be an artist. She has selected some delightful young people to dance for her, and she has built her dances directly and most unorthodoxly upon them. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Her father's younger brother was the film director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, who spelled his family name differently. They had a son namely Jonathan de Mille Prude who was born in 1946. Agnes de Mille, 88, Dance Visionary, Is Dead, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/08/obituaries/agnes-de-mille-88-dance-visionary-is-dead.html. First presented by Ballet Theater with Agnes de Mille, Annabelle Lyon, Lucia Chase, and Eugene Loring at the Majestic Theater, New York City, February 11, 1941 (an earlier version with different music was in the 1934 London revue Why Not T… She was invited to choreograph for Ballet Theater -- a company now known as American Ballet Theater -- for the group's first season in 1940. A must Lizzie Borden fanatics like me. Unfortunately, this undertaking remained unfinished. Her work Black Ritual (Obeah), set to Milhaud's La Creation Du Monde, had an all-black cast, a rarity for its time, and she followed this with Three Virgins and a Devil (1941), a raunchy comic romp often revived. The producer Irving Thalberg later hired her to choreograph Cukor's Romeo And Juliet (1936). The cause was a stroke, said Dr. Fred Plum, the head of neurology at New York Hospital and a close friend. Obeah, Black Ritual (Darius Milhaud). But she continued to work. Created 'People And Not Automata', Writing of "Oklahoma!," Mr. Martin commented in The Times: "Miss de Mille has turned her back entirely on the established procedure of making 'routines.' In 1946 de Mille returned to London, at the request of the director Wesley Ruggles, to choreograph what was intended to be the first big-screen British musical, London Town, but she was so dismayed at the script and Ruggles' direction and ideas that she requested that her name be removed from the credits. "There was never a sandpapering of the edge of her curiosity." ONE OF the most important and influential of American choreographers, Agnes de Mille brought a new kind of indigenously American style to both ballet and the Broadway musical. Miss de Mille originally danced the female lead role herself. opened on Broadway in 1943 and ran for more than five years. De Mille's dances for Oklahoma] were acclaimed not only for their novelty but the way they delineated character and were integrated into the show. by. She was an original member of the National Council on the Arts and the first chairman of its Dance Panel in 1965. Miss de Mille was married to Walter Prude, a concert-artists' manager, from 1943 until his death in 1988. In 1950 she directed "Out of This World," but the choreography was by the modern dancer Hanya Holm. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? "Rodeo" led to Miss de Mille's next triumph. She occasionally returned to America to choreograph, including the dances for Leslie Howard's 1936 Broadway production of "Hamlet" and the 1937 M-G-M film version of "Romeo and Juliet." 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