Sir Robert Murray Helpmann (né Helpman; 9 April 1909 – 28 September 1986) was an Australian ballet dancer, actor, choreographer, and director. After early work in Australia, he moved to Britain in 1932, where he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet (now The Royal Ballet) under its creator, Ninette de Valois. He became one of the company's leading men, partnering Alicia Markova and later Margot Fonteyn. When Frederick Ashton, the company's chief choreographer, was called up for military service in the Second World War, Helpmann took over from him while continuing as a principal dancer.
From the outset of his career, Helpmann was an actor as well as a dancer, and in the 1940s he turned increasingly to acting in plays, at the Old Vic and in the West End. Most of his roles were in Shakespeare plays, but he also appeared in works by Shaw, Coward, Sartre and others. As a director, his range was wide, from Shakespeare to opera, musicals and pantomime.
In 1965, Helpmann became co-director of the Australian Ballet, for whom he created several new ballets. He became sole director in 1975, but disagreements with the company's board led to his dismissal a year later. He directed for Australian Opera and acted in stage plays into the 1980s. Although primarily a stage artist, he appeared in fifteen films between 1942 (One of Our Aircraft is Missing) and 1984 (Second Time Lucky), including The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, as the Devil in a film version of Igor Stravinsky's ballet-drama The Soldier's Tale (L'Histoire du soldat) and as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Helpmann died in Sydney in 1986, and was given a state funeral in St Andrew's Cathedral. The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, gave a tribute in the Parliament of Australia, and a motion of condolence was passed – a rare tribute for a non-politician. Helpmann is commemorated in the Helpmann Awards for Australian performing arts, established in his honour in 2001.
Helpmann was born in Mount Gambier, South Australia, the eldest of the three children of James Murray Helpman (1881–1927), a stock and station agent and auctioneer, and his wife, Mary, née Gardiner (1883–1970). Mary Helpman had a passion for the theatre, and her enthusiasm was passed on to all three of her children. Helpmann's younger brother Max (1914–1987) and their sister Sheila (1916–1994) both made their own careers on stage, television and screen.
After being what his biographer Kathrine Sorley Walker calls "an uninterested and recalcitrant scholar" at Prince Alfred College, Adelaide, Helpmann was taken on as a student apprentice by Anna Pavlova when she was on tour in Australia in 1926. He was trained by Alexis Dolinoff, her leading male dancer. He then joined the theatrical producers J. C. Williamson Ltd, as principal dancer for musicals, revues, and pantomimes, beginning with Franz Lehár's Frasquita in 1927. He later appeared in Katinka, The Merry Widow, The New Moon, Queen High, This Year of Grace and Tip-Toes, appearing with stars such as Gladys Moncrieff, Marie Burke and Maisie Gay. Sorley Walker writes, "His vitality and bravura presentation of dances stopped various shows".
Robert Helpmann cited Melbourne eccentric, beautician, radio broadcaster, actor and dancer Stephanie Deste as one of the influences over his dancing and acting career.
The English actress Margaret Rawlings, who was touring Australia, was impressed by Helpmann. She encouraged him to pursue a career in Britain, and provided him with an introduction to Ninette de Valois, director of the Vic-Wells Ballet (later named the Sadler's Wells Ballet). Helpmann left Australia in 1932, and did not return until 1955. De Valois accepted him into her company. He impressed her – she later wrote "Everything about him proclaims the artist born" – although she noted not only his strengths but also his weaknesses: "talented, enthusiastic, extremely intelligent, great facility, witty, cute as a monkey, quick as a squirrel, a sense of theatre and his own possible achievements therein" but "academically technically weak, lacking in concentration, too fond of a good time and too busy having it". In the mid-1930s, probably at Rawlings's suggestion, he added a second "n" to his surname, to give it a more foreign and exotic air.
In April 1934 de Valois created a new ballet, The Haunted Ballroom, with Helpmann and Alicia Markova in the leading roles. The Times commented that of the soloists Helpmann "had the greatest opportunities, and made fine use of them". He co-starred with Markova in Swan Lake, danced in operas, and appeared at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park. In 1935 he was leading dancer in the revue Stop Press, with music by Irving Berlin. At Sadler's Wells he danced the principal role in another new de Valois ballet, The Rake's Progress, and in 1936 Frederick Ashton choreographed a highly romantic ballet, Apparitions, to music by Liszt, featuring Helpmann and the teenaged Margot Fonteyn. Sorley Walker writes that he and Fonteyn were a "perfectly matched partnership", exemplified by "their superb rendering of the Aurora pas de deux in The Sleeping Beauty". As well as romantic leading roles, Helpmann became known for his gift for comedy. Sorley Walker singles out his roles in Coppélia, Ashton's A Wedding Bouquet and de Valois's The Prospect Before Us. Character roles included the doddery Red King in de Valois' Checkmate, which he first danced at the age of 28 and last danced in 1986 when he was 77.
Helpmann's non-ballet work in the later 1930s included his Oberon in Tyrone Guthrie's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic, which also starred Vivien Leigh as Titania and Ralph Richardson as Bottom. The drama critic of The Times wrote:
It will be useless in future for Mr. Robert Helpmann to pretend that he is exclusively a dancer of the first rank. Certainly his dancing gives strength to his Oberon; he glides into imagined invisibility; but that is not all: his verse sings with his thought, his Oberon flashes with power, and presides, as Oberons do rarely, over the whole magic of the wood.
The doyen of London critics, James Agate, pronounced Helpmann's Oberon to be, in its way, "the best I have ever seen or ever shall see".
Helpmann was part of the Sadler's Wells Ballet touring party who were stranded in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded in May 1940. Helpmann and the company were on the last British boat to be evacuated as the Dutch surrendered. The true story of his escape from Holland during the German invasion is told in the book 'Escape From Holland' by Chris Hunt.
During the Second World War Sadler's Wells Ballet became a prominent contributor to public morale, giving London seasons interspersed with a demanding programme of provincial tours. Helpmann's workload often required him to dance leads in three performances in one day, and when Ashton was called up for active service in 1941, Helpmann took on the additional role of choreographer to the company. Ashton, in his enforced absence from the company, observed Helpmann's rise to pre-eminence with feelings of envy, and their relationship became edgy on Ashton's part. The ballets that Helpmann created for the wartime company were Comus (1942, based on Milton), The Birds (1942, to Respighi's Gli uccelli), Miracle in the Gorbals (1944, a story of redemption with a plot by Benthall and music by Arthur Bliss), and a version of Hamlet set to Tchaikovsky's music. While on leave from the RAF in 1943, Ashton created a new ballet for Helpmann, The Quest, a patriotic tale of Saint George, with music by William Walton, who commented that Helpmann in the lead "looked more like the Dragon than St George." The music has survived but the ballet has not.
Helpmann returned to Hamlet in 1944 in the title role of the original play, with the Old Vic company. After the laudatory reviews for his Oberon, those for his Hamlet were more mixed. Ivor Brown thought it "eager, intelligent and exciting", Agate called Helpmann's prince "most heart-breaking" and the young Peter Brook found Helpmann's fast-paced performance highly exciting, but other critics thought it a lightweight interpretation, and opinions varied about the quality of Helpmann's verse-speaking. During the war Helpmann played his first film roles: the supercilious traitor De Jong in One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) and the comically fussy Bishop of Ely in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944).