Isabel Mirrow

Isabel Mirrow Brown (June 9, 1928 – August 2014) was an American ballerina born in New York City to Jewish-Russian immigrant parents, Sonia and Alexander "Sasha" Mirrow (1893–1977). She grew up in the Bronx, New York.

Mirrow began her professional career on Broadway in 1945, appearing in the musical The Day Before Spring. She subsequently joined American Ballet Theatre in New York City, where she served as a principal dancer from 1947 to 1953. Among her contemporaries at ABT during that period were Svetlana Beriosova, Tamara Toumanova, and Irina Baronova. Following her years as a principal dancer, Mirrow became a dance mentor to aspiring performers and worked with Finis Jhung's Ballet Company.

At ABT, Mirrow met dancer Kelly Kingman Brown (1928–1981), a Mississippi native who had trained at the Stone-Camryn School of Ballet in Chicago before relocating to New York. The two married and had four children: daughters Leslie Browne and Elizabeth, and sons Kelly Brown II, a film producer, and Ethan Brown, who danced as a soloist with ABT until 2004. Kelly Brown went on to appear as a featured dancer in several Hollywood musical films, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Daddy Long Legs, The Girl Most Likely, and Oklahoma!, and served as dance captain for the Broadway production of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, starring Barbra Streisand.

In the 1960s, after both Mirrow and her husband had stepped back from performing as principal dancers, the family relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where they ran a dance studio together. When their daughters auditioned for the School of American Ballet in New York, Leslie was accepted, followed by Elizabeth a year later. The move to Arizona proved difficult for Mirrow, who became homesick for New York. The couple divorced, and she returned to New York to support her daughters during their training there.

Mirrow had been childhood friends with ballerina Nora Kaye, whose parents had emigrated from Russia to New York City at the same time as the Mirrow family and lived in the same brownstone apartment building. Kaye later married film director Herbert Ross and became the godmother of Mirrow's eldest daughter, Leslie, born in 1957.

In the 1970s, screenwriter Arthur Laurents developed a script based on the Brown family, which became the 1977 film The Turning Point, directed by Herbert Ross and produced by Ross and Kaye. The film presented a fictionalized account of Mirrow's life, with the family surname changed to "Rodgers." Shirley MacLaine was cast to portray a character based on Mirrow. Dancer Gelsey Kirkland was originally cast to play the role inspired by Leslie but withdrew due to substance abuse problems, after which Ross cast Leslie herself to portray a fictionalized version of her own story. Leslie, who had added an "e" to her surname as a stage name after being misidentified as male in a playbill, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at age 20. MacLaine received a nomination for Best Actress for her portrayal of Leslie's mother. The Turning Point was nominated for eleven Academy Awards in total, including Best Picture. Mirrow's younger daughter, Elizabeth Brown Healy, born in 1959, was portrayed in the film by Lisa Lucas under the fictionalized name "Janina."