Virginia Bosler

Virginia Bosler (September 23, 1926 – August 30, 2020) was an American actress and dancer born in Newton, Massachusetts, who performed on Broadway from 1947 to 1963. Known to friends and family by the childhood nickname "Winkie," she originated the role of Jean MacLaren in Brigadoon and went on to build a career spanning stage, film, and television before transitioning into choreographic notation and yoga instruction in her later decades.

Bosler's father worked as a maritime engineer, and the family relocated frequently along the eastern seaboard during her childhood. At age seven she settled in Great Neck, Long Island, where her mother enrolled her in ballet classes out of concern for her posture. For three years she studied with Mikhail Mordkin and the Swobodas before the family moved to New London, Connecticut, where her formal dance training paused until high school. She resumed her studies at Cherry Lawn High School in Darien, Connecticut, a progressive institution where she focused on modern and folk dancing under Laura Morgan, a protégée of Hanya Holm. Between her sophomore and junior years, at age fifteen, Bosler attended Jacob's Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts, for the first time. She returned for the two following summers as a scholarship student, performing in the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, learning Pilates directly from its creator Joseph Pilates, and earning the regard of Jacob's Pillow founder Ted Shawn. After what she described as a disastrous year at Barnard College, she left school to pursue a professional dance career, subsequently studying with Hanya Holm, Cia Fornaroli, and Merce Cunningham.

Her professional breakthrough came in the spring of 1946 when she was cast in the national tour of Bloomer Girl, choreographed by Agnes de Mille and starring Nanette Fabray. The tour ran for nine months through cities including Toronto, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Pittsburgh. Observing Bosler's work over the course of the tour, de Mille asked her to fly to New York from the Pittsburgh stop to audition for the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Brigadoon. Bosler won the role of Jean MacLaren, originating it on Broadway in 1947 and performing it for more than a year and a half in that production before continuing in the national tour from 1948 to 1949. She reprised the role at New York City Center in both 1957 and 1963, and appeared in the 1954 MGM film adaptation, though her part was substantially reduced from the stage version.

Her subsequent Broadway credits included Out of This World (1950–51), the Agnes de Mille–directed Cole Porter musical choreographed by Hanya Holm and starring Charlotte Greenwood. She joined Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a replacement and remained through its closing cast in 1951. A Month of Sundays, a musical starring Nancy Walker, closed out of town in January 1952 before reaching Broadway. Later that year she appeared in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952, which ran through 1953. She also performed in the drama Red Roses for Me on Broadway in 1955.

Although officially a member of the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre for its national tour from 1953 to 1954, Bosler was absent from a significant portion of the engagements because she was filming Brigadoon in Culver City from December 1953 through March 1954. Immediately following the film's premiere in September 1954, she returned to Culver City to shoot her scenes for the film adaptation of Oklahoma!, for which de Mille recreated and adapted her original stage choreography. Both Brigadoon and Oklahoma! were notable for being filmed twice during principal photography using separate cameras to accommodate the widescreen processes of CinemaScope and Todd-AO, respectively, resulting in different versions of each film sharing the same prerecorded songs. A European stage tour of Oklahoma!, headlined by Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, followed in the summer of 1955 with stops in Paris, Rome, and London, and the film opened in its Todd-AO 70mm engagements that October. In 1956 Bosler appeared in two live NBC Producers' Showcase broadcasts, Bloomer Girl and Jack and the Beanstalk, and performed in Finian's Rainbow at Valley Forge Music Fair in Pennsylvania. Her television work also included the Bell Telephone Hour production Cherry Tree Carol in 1959. Off Broadway, she appeared in If Five Years Pass in 1962, and she returned to New York City Center in 1963 for both a revival of Brigadoon and a production of Oklahoma!

Just before turning thirty, Bosler married Hubert Alexander Doris, a professor of music at Barnard College, in 1956. The couple had two adopted children, Alexander and Julia, and eventually settled in Hancock, Maine, where Hubert Doris died on June 8, 2008. Bosler spent her retirement in Ellsworth, Maine.

Following her retirement from performance in 1963, Bosler pursued two distinct second careers. Beginning in the late 1970s she studied Labanotation, a system for documenting choreography in written form, and spent approximately ten years working for the Dance Notation Bureau in New York City. During that period she created Labanotation scores for works by choreographers including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Eugene Loring, and Richard Englund; those scores are preserved in the archives of the New York Public Library. In 1997, at the age of seventy, she began teaching yoga. Bosler died on August 30, 2020.