George Zoritch

George Zoritch, born Yuri Zorich in Moscow in June 1917, was a Russian-born American ballet dancer whose career spanned from the 1930s to the 1960s. He appeared on Broadway between 1943 and 1950 and performed with Ballet Russe companies across the United States. He died on 1 November 2009.

Zoritch was the younger of two sons born to Elena Zoritch, an opera singer. When he was approximately one year old, his mother relocated the family from Moscow to Kovno, the provisional capital of Lithuania, where she joined the opera company at the National Opera and Ballet Theater. Both Yuri and his older brother began their dance training there. At age fourteen, the family moved to Paris, where Zoritch studied with Olga Preobrajenskaya, a former star of the Russian Imperial Ballet. He later studied with Anatole Vilzak, Anatole Oboukhoff, and Bronislava Nijinska.

After only nine months of study with Preobrajenskaya, Zoritch received his first professional engagement in 1932 through dancer and actress Ida Rubenstein, who had booked a season at the Paris Opera featuring ballets by Michel Fokine. An engagement with Nijinska's Ballets de Paris in 1935 led to his membership in two companies formed after Sergei Diaghilev's death in 1929: the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, directed by René Blum, and the Original Ballet Russe, directed by Colonel Wassily de Basil. In the de Basil company, choreographer Léonide Massine cast the eighteen-year-old Zoritch in eleven ballets, among them Symphonie Fantastique in 1936, set to music by Hector Berlioz. In that production, Zoritch danced in the Melancholy pas de trois in the first movement, as the Young Shepherd in the third movement, and as one of three Monsters in the fifth movement.

Following a legal dispute between Blum and de Basil in 1938, Blum secured rights to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo name and, with Massine as artistic director, built a company oriented toward touring the United States. Zoritch became one of its principal male dancers, alongside Igor Youskevitch and Frederic Franklin, frequently performing with ballerinas Alexandra Danilova, Rosella Hightower, and Nathalie Krassovska. During this period he took on two contrasting roles created by Massine: Khan, the Mongol leader, in Bogatyri, set to music by Alexander Borodin, and the magazine character Eustace Tilley in The New Yorker, set to music by George Gershwin, both in 1938 and 1940 respectively. Between those productions, he appeared as the Fiancé in Frederick Ashton's Devil's Holiday, presented at the Metropolitan Opera House in October 1939, a work set to music by Vincenzo Tommasini on themes of Niccolò Paganini.

During the 1940s, Zoritch pursued a parallel career in Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. His Broadway debut came in 1943 with Early to Bed, a musical comedy with music by Thomas "Fats" Waller and dances by Robert Alton, in which he appeared as Pablo, dancing with Jane Deering to "Slightly Less Than Wonderful." In 1944 he appeared in Rhapsody, an operetta with music by Fritz Kreisler and choreography by David Lichine, dancing with Patricia Bowman in the "Chinese Porcelain Ballet" in the first act and the "Midnight Ballet" in the second. His final Broadway credit came in 1950 with Pardon Our French, a musical revue with music by Victor Young and Harry Sukman, in which he performed as the Shadow Dancer in the opening number, as the First Lover of Patricia Denise in "Venezia and Her Three Lovers," and as a dancer in "A Face in the Crowd" and "The Polker Polka."

His film work during the same decade included the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night and Day, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith, in which Zoritch danced with Milada Mladova in a "Begin the Beguine" sequence. The Hollywood Reporter noted that if Zoritch could act as well as he danced and looked, he had the makings of a new star. His Russian accent, however, prevented him from taking speaking roles. He appeared in the 1947 film Escape Me Never alongside Errol Flynn, Ida Lupino, Eleanor Parker, and Gig Young, dancing the male lead in a ballet sequence. In 1949 he was the Sword Dancer in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, and also appeared in Look for the Silver Lining, a biopic of Marilyn Miller starring June Haver, Ray Bolger, and Gordon MacRae, performing a pas de trois with Haver and Oleg Tupine while MacRae sang "A Kiss in the Dark." In 1956 he appeared as an uncredited dancer in the Technicolor epic Helen of Troy, directed by Robert Wise.

In 1951, Zoritch joined Le Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in France, a company based in Cannes and Deauville with regular seasons in Paris and tours across western Europe. Its roster included Tamara Toumanova, Alicia Markova, and Nathalie Krassovska. With that company he performed Le Spectre de la Rose in a version choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, after one performance of which he received eighteen curtain calls.