Nora Kaye, Renowned U.S. Ballerina, Is Dead at 67

Nora Kaye, a one-time Broadway chorine who became a founding dancer of the Ballet Theatre at its inception in 1939 and eventually the first internationally famous American ballerina, died Saturday of cancer.

She was 67 and died at her home in Santa Monica.

Miss Kaye was most recently known for her production efforts in the films “Turning Point,” “Nijinsky,” “Pennies From Heaven” and the soon-to-be-released “Giselle,” featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov. She shared production credits with her husband, Herbert Ross.

But to earlier generations Miss Kaye was the American dance theater, a glamorous yet intense interpreter of movement that ranged from sacred to profane.

As a dancer, Miss Kaye will be remembered primarily for her portrayals of Hagar in “Pillar of Fire” and as the Accused in “Fall River Legend,” the Agnes de Mille ballet based on ax murderer Lizzie Borden.

But beyond her performances she will be recalled in artistic circles in years to come for the dramatic validity she brought to American dance after World War II when only a handful of French and Soviet emigres knew what had been transpiring on the domestic dance scene.

Unwittingly she became the first famous export of American dance when in 1946 and at the height of her melding of artistry and professionalism, she set sail for England with Ballet Theatre (today’s American Ballet Theatre). The troupe sailed on a Queen Mary still compartmentalized to carry troops to war. When the company arrived in London, she enchanted the British as Odile in the Black Swan pas de deux from “Swan Lake.”

The Times of London critic said her performance “excelled anything” seen there “for years.” It was an initial inkling as to how American dance had evolved under such choreographers as Antony Tudor and George Balanchine.

It was Tudor who cast her as Hagar in his psychological ballet of frustration in 1941, only two years after she joined the corps de ballet of the embryonic Ballet Theatre company.

And she almost did not make it to the corps, much less to center stage.

‘An American Name’

Nora Kaye was born Nora Koreff in New York City and named for the heroine in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” She changed her surname early in her career because, as she told one early interviewer, “an American dancer ought to have an American name.” Her father was a former Moscow actor who tried to indoctrinate his daughter in the Stanislavsky method popularized later by Marlon Brando. But her mother wanted her to become a dancer. And mother won out.

She took her first dance lesson at age 4 and was enrolled in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School four years later. She was accepted into the opera company’s corps de ballet at 14. Later she joined Balanchine’s American Ballet when it became the Met’s resident dance company in 1935. But she also studied three days a week with Michel Fokine, the fabled choreographer who had been ballet master in St. Petersburg when Miss Kaye’s parents were still in Russia.

Fokine was an innovator who tried to liberate his students from the classicists he had worked with in Russia. As Miss Kaye wrote in the anthology “American Ballet Theatre,” “On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I was trained in the classical technique (at the Metropolitan)--on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday I was told by Fokine not to use it. . . .”

Thus she became a proficient if sometimes puzzled master of both worlds of ballet.

Despite her ambidexterity she soon abandoned ballet, a combination of a lack of work and being treated as what she called “moving scenery” by the opera-oriented Metropolitan management that naturally subordinated dancers to singers.

Turned to Broadway

She turned to Broadway and was hired to perform a classical dance in the musical “Great Lady,” a short-lived but artistically remembered show that included fellow dancers Alicia Alonso, Jerome Robbins and Andre Eglevsky. Her next production, “Stars in Your Eyes,” starred Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante and featured the Russian ballerina Tamara Toumanova. She also co-starred with Bette Davis in “Two’s Company.”

During this period (the late 1930s) Miss Kaye picked up additional paychecks--as a member of the Radio City Music Hall corps de ballet and as a dancer at the International Casino.

When Ballet Theatre was being formed in 1939, Miss Kaye, who by then had convinced herself that her future lay in the musical theater rather than ballet, went to the auditions, but just, she wrote later, to accompany a roommate. She was urged to audition, did, and was accepted into the corps but joined “only because most of my friends were joining.”

Over the years they proved the best friends she was ever to have.

Antony Tudor shared the choreography responsibilities with Fokine, and through Tudor she changed her “whole opinion of ballet. I began working with the choreographer who gave life to all my as yet unformed aspirations.”

During Ballet Theater’s first season in New York in 1940, she danced in Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” and “Lilac Garden.” Parts in “Les Sylphides” and “Swan Lake” followed and then she was offered her first significant character role--that of the disdainful ballerina in “Gala Performance.” The New York Times critic celebrated her “fine technique” and “most ingratiating comedy sense.”

There followed secondary roles in “Peter and the Wolf,” “Giselle” and “Princess Aurora” before “Pillar of Fire” firmly established her in the dance firmament. John Martin, the New York Times critic, said the world premiere of “Pillar” on April 8, 1942, was the most distinguished event in the young company’s history, and he called Miss Kaye’s Hagar one of “the great examples of tragic acting of its generation.”

Variety of Roles

Catapulted to stardom, she was given an increasing variety of prima ballerina roles, among them “Bluebeard,” “Apollo,” and now the title role in “Princess Aurora.” She starred in the world premieres of Tudor’s “Dim Lustre” and Leonide Massine’s “Mademoiselle Angot.” The Ballet Theatre’s 1943 season has been called “Miss Kaye’s season” and if that accolade were in doubt, all questions vanished when Alicia Markova became ill and Miss Kaye substituted for her in “Romeo and Juliet.”

After the company returned from London in 1946, where the applause exceeded even what the troupe had been accustomed to in New York, Miss Kaye found herself the reigning queen of American ballet. Agnes de Mille devised “Fall River Legend” for her. Illness prevented Miss Kaye from dancing at the 1948 premiere, but it was a role later identified closely with the rest of her dancing years. She became the Ballerina in “Petrouchka,” danced the title role of “Giselle,” (subsequently appearing in the first televised performance of that classic) and by 1950, on the 10th anniversary of the first Ballet Theatre production, was performing Tudor’s new “Nimbus” and William Dollar’s version of “Jeux.” The critic of Dancing Times called her “the greatest actress of the dance today.”

Miss Kaye moved to the New York City Ballet in 1951 where her dramatic abilities were exploited. At one point (1952) Jerome Robbins, then her fiance but never her husband, presented her in “Cage,” in which she played a species of female insect whose prey was her male counterparts. The New York Herald Tribune found her “frighteningly inhuman, provocative and glittering.”

Her affiliation with the city company lasted only until 1954, and she returned to Ballet Theatre where in addition to her Tudor and De Mille repertory she was seen often in “Giselle” and “Swan Lake.” There too she performed in ballets by Herbert Ross, who was to become her third husband (after Michael Van Buren and violinist Isaac Stern). Soon they formed a company, Ballet of Two Worlds, which toured Europe in 1960 performing such Ross choreography as “Persephone” and “The Dybbuk.”

She retired in 1961 and over the years assisted her husband in films including “Funny Lady,” “Turning Point,” which made extensive use of American Ballet Theatre personnel, “The Seven Percent Solution,” “The Last of Sheila” and “The Secret of My Success.” She also was the founding chairman of the Music Center’s Dance Presentations.

In 1977 she rejoined American Ballet Theatre but now as an associate director, sharing those duties with former mentor Tudor, whose notions on movement she proudly said had made Ballet Theatre “a thinking company.”