Agnes de Mille

Agnes George de Mille (September 18, 1905 – October 7, 1993) was an American dancer and choreographer born in New York City. Her father, William C. deMille, and her uncle, Cecil B. DeMille, were both Hollywood directors. Her mother, Anna Angela George, was the daughter of economist Henry George. On her father's side, de Mille descended from playwrights Henry Churchill de Mille and Matilda Beatrice deMille, and her paternal grandmother was of German-Jewish descent.

De Mille originally aspired to be an actress but was discouraged and redirected her ambitions toward dance. In 1919 she enrolled at the Kosloff School of Dance in Los Angeles, where she studied under Theodore Kosloff and his partner Natacha Rambova. She joined ballet classes alongside her younger sister, who had been prescribed them for flat feet. Despite limited flexibility and a physique that did not conform to classical ballet standards, de Mille developed strong character work by observing film performers on her father's sets in Hollywood. Her parents did not support dance as a career, and she did not pursue it seriously until after completing her education. She graduated from UCLA with a degree in English, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, and in 1933 relocated to London to study with Dame Marie Rambert. There she joined Rambert's company, The Ballet Club — later Ballet Rambert — as well as Antony Tudor's London Ballet.

An early professional assignment came through her father's connections: choreographing Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 film Cleopatra. Conflicts with the film's dance director LeRoy Prinz led to her departure from the project. De Mille arrived in New York in 1938 and began her association with the American Ballet Theatre, then called the Ballet Theatre, in 1939. Among her first works for the company was Black Ritual (Obeah), choreographed for the Ballet Theatre's inaugural season and performed by sixteen Black ballerinas. The piece, which ran approximately twenty-five minutes, marked the first time Black dancers appeared in a New York ballet performance within a predominantly white company. Though performed only three times, it represented a significant milestone in American ballet history. Her first widely recognized work was Rodeo (1942), set to a score by Aaron Copland and staged for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Two other de Mille ballets have remained in regular repertoire: Three Virgins and a Devil (1934), adapted from a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, and Fall River Legend (1948), based on the life of Lizzie Borden. Her final ballet, The Other, was completed in 1992.

In 1941, while working for Ballet Theatre in New York, de Mille choreographed Drums Sound in Hackensack for the Jooss Ballet, a German company that had relocated to New York in 1939. The work was notable as the first piece in the company's history not choreographed by Kurt Jooss himself. It also represented one of de Mille's earliest efforts choreographing a large group of dancers rather than one or two individuals.

De Mille's Broadway career spanned from 1941 to 1972, and her work transformed the role of dance in American musical theater. Following the success of Rodeo, she was engaged to choreograph Oklahoma! (1943), in which a dream ballet — featuring dancers Marc Platt, Katherine Sergava, and George Church doubling for the leading actors — was integrated directly into the musical's plot to illuminate the heroine's emotional state. The production is widely credited with establishing de Mille's reputation as a Broadway choreographer. She went on to choreograph more than a dozen musicals, including Bloomer Girl (1944), Carousel (1945), Allegro (1947, for which she also served as director), Brigadoon (1947), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), Paint Your Wagon (1951), The Girl in Pink Tights (1954), Goldilocks (1957), and 110 in the Shade (1963). Her Broadway credits also include A Celebration of Richard Rodgers and Gizelle. For Brigadoon, de Mille was co-recipient of the inaugural Tony Award for Best Choreography in 1947. She received a second Tony Award for Best Choreography in 1962.

Her film work was more limited. Her only significant film credit is the 1955 screen adaptation of Oklahoma!. She was not invited to recreate her choreography for the film versions of either Brigadoon (1954) or Carousel (1956). In 1956, however, two specials she created for the Omnibus television series — The Art of Ballet and The Art of Choreography — were recognized as landmark efforts to bring serious dance to a broad public audience.

De Mille regularly collaborated with a core group of dancers that included Virginia Bosler, Gemze de Lappe, Lidija Franklin, Jean Houloose, Dania Krupska, Bambi Linn, Joan McCracken, James Mitchell, Mavis Ray, and, at American Ballet Theatre, Sallie Wilson. Krupska, Mitchell, and Ray served as her assistant choreographers, while de Lappe took an active role in preserving her work. In 1973, de Mille founded the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, which she later revived as Heritage Dance Theatre.

President John F. Kennedy appointed de Mille to the National Advisory Committee on the Arts, the predecessor to the National Endowment for the Arts, to which President Lyndon B. Johnson subsequently appointed her following its creation. De Mille also became an active public advocate for dance, speaking before Congress on three occasions: once in the Senate, once in the House of Representatives, and once before the Committee for Medical Research. She was interviewed in the 1980 television documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, where she discussed the work of her uncle Cecil B. DeMille. She appears in Frederick Wiseman's 1995 film Ballet, in a wheelchair, rehearsing her final piece, The Other.