Vera Zorina

Strikingly beautiful ballerina/actress sometime married to Balanchine

Eva Brigitta Hartwig (Vera Zorina), dancer and actress: born Berlin 2 January 1917; married 1938 George Balanchine (died 1983; marriage dissolved 1946), 1946 Goddard Lieberson (died 1977; one son, and one son deceased), 1991 Paul Wolfe; died Santa Fe, New Mexico 9 April 2003

The actress and ballerina Vera Zorina won acclaim from London theatre audiences when at the age of 19 she starred in the original production of On Your Toes (1936). Zorina stopped the show with her dancing of Richard Rodgers's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue", choreographed by the legendary George Balanchine, who was to become her husband.

Shortly afterwards she began her film career with a starring role in The Goldwyn Follies and in 1938 she captivated Broadway with her appearance in Rodgers and Hart's I Married an Angel. A striking, long-legged beauty with a sensational figure, she included among her lovers Léonide Massine, Orson Welles, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Erich Maria Remarque. Later she became noted as a performer-narrator in dramatic oratarios and as an opera director.

Born in 1917 in Berlin, to a German father, Fritz and a Norwegian mother, Billie, who were both professional singers, she always considered herself Norwegian. Her real name was Eva Brigitta Hartwig and she was educated at the Lyceum for Girls in Berlin. She made her stage début at the age of two as a butterfly in a flower ballet, and, after her parents separated when she was six, she started training for the dance with Olga Preobrajenska and Nicholas Legat – Legat had taught Pavlova and Nijinsky. At the age of 12 she was cast by Max Reinhardt as the first elf in his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1929), and two years later in The Tales of Hoffman.

Moving to London in 1933, she was chosen by Anton Dolin to appear with him in Ballerina, a play with ballet interludes at the Gaiety Theatre. The show was seen by Léonide Massine and Colonel de Basil, who asked her to join their Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They insisted, though, that she change her name, and they presented her with a list of Russian names from which to choose. "I picked Vera Zorina for the simple reason that it was the only one I could pronounce," she said. She always loathed the name, and throughout her life was known to family and friends as "Brigitta".

She danced with the Ballet Russe for three seasons, appearing at Covent Garden in London and the Metropolitan in New York, and during this period was romantically linked with the great dancer André Eglevsky. She confessed in her autobiography Zorina (1986) that at the age of 18 she also became involved in an open ménage à trois that included Massine, then the world's best-known choreographer, and his wife Eugenia Delarova. For the Ballet Russe she was the Street Dancer in Massine's Le Beau Danube and Action in his Les Présages, and she was particularly proud of her work in Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces, to the music of Stravinsky.

When she was chosen to star as a temperamental ballerina in the West End production of On Your Toes, Balanchine found in her the perfect exponent of his modern-dance innovations (Tamara Geva had created the role on Broadway). Her co-star was Jack Whiting, the stepfather of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who first met Zorina at the first-night party at the Savoy Grill. "She possessed classical beauty, magnificent technique, and a great sense of humour," he was to write. They renewed their relationship in New York when Zorina was starring in I Married an Angel and he had what he described as a "heady involvement" with her until she returned the ring he had given her, informing him that she was to marry Balanchine.

Orson Welles, who was also in love with the ballerina, did not take Balanchine seriously as a rival, and on his radio version of Dracula in 1938 (part of his Mercury Theatre on the Air series) he deliberately had one of the lost sailors named Balanchine. "Is Balanchine below?" asks one of the crew, and the sailors reply, "Balanchine's gone – like the other – like all the others!"

Zorina had settled in America after being asked by Sam Goldwyn to star in his lavish film musical The Goldwyn Follies in 1937. The music was to be written by George Gershwin, who had signed for the film primarily for the chance to compose a piece called "Swing Symphony" for a Balanchine-Zorina ballet. His untimely death unfortunately occurred before the work was written. Zorina recalled,

All I knew of Sam Goldwyn was that he was the most distinguished producer in America. But there was only one reason I signed with him: George Balanchine was going to do the choreography.

Though undeniably one of the most gifted and influential of ballet choreographers of the last century, Balanchine was rarely represented at his best on the cinema screen. In the stage version of On Your Toes, one of his brightest inventions was a number in which a ballet group competed with a tap group performing the title tune. In The Goldwyn Follies he used the same idea in a number based on Romeo and Juliet in which the rival families are the jazzy Montagues and the balletic Capulets, but the result was far less effective. More successful was the "Waternymph" ballet, in which Zorina rose from the bottom of a fountain swathed in a gold lamé tunic.

Sam Goldwyn was to become another of Zorina's romantic conquests, falling desperately in love with her. He would attend her rehearsals whenever possible, had countless tests made of her which he would watch endlessly, and bought her several expensive trinkets. Sam Goldwyn Jnr told Goldwyn's biographer Scott Berg, "The only fights I ever remember my parents having with each other, real fights in which my mother threatened to leave him, were over Zorina." Many years later Zorina commented that his expressions of love were lost on her:

My interests were somewhere else. I was falling in love with Balanchine. Not only did I love him, he was becoming my everything.

Rodgers and Hart, composers of On Your Toes, had not seen the London production, and when preparing their musical I Married an Angel (1938) the producer Dwight Wiman, not wanting to oversell Zorina, suggested to Rodgers that she might be good in a small part. Rodgers wrote:

A little while later, I was at a party in Hollywood when in walked a breathtakingly lovely young girl with a charming European accent who quickly had everyone crowding around her. The next day I sent Dwight a telegram: SMALL PART NOTHING HAVE JUST MET VERA ZORINA THAT'S OUR ANGEL.

The show had one Balanchine ballet in each act. The first act had a straightforward "Honeymoon Ballet", but the second featured a devastating parody of Radio City Music Hall, which satirised the size of the hall and its lavish productions. It displayed the humour of both Balanchine and Zorina and proved the hit of the show, which was another personal triumph for the star. George Jean Nathan wrote in Newsweek,

Vera Zorina gratifies the vision not only with a real dance talent but a face and figure that does not demand the customary volitional imaginative soft focus to help them out.

Rodgers and Hart, anxious to write a show tailored specifically for Zorina's talents, conceived a musical, Higher and Higher, about a maid who is passed off as a debutante, but Zorina's film commitments prevented her from doing it and it was rewritten for the singer Marta Eggert.

Zorina was to make seven films in Hollywood but never achieved great popularity due to a glacial demeanour and limited acting ability, and she failed to popularise ballet in film musicals as her admirers hoped she might. The stunning beauty and vibrant personality that so entranced those who saw her on stage failed to translate to celluloid. The 1939 screen version of On Your Toes, with all its songs inexplicably removed, was a disaster. The New York Times said, "Off its toes, it has a habit of falling flat on its face", while the New York Herald Tribune noted:

The lovely Zorina, the brilliant ballet parody "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue", and some superior bits of terpsichore are the sole virtues of a ragged and dull screen musical.

Her most notworthy performance was in the little-known I Was an Adventuress (1940), an enjoyable tale of confidence tricksters which teamed her with the brilliant pairing of Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre. The film ends with a lavish extract from Swan Lake, choreographed by Balanchine.

She returned to the Broadway stage in 1940 to star in Irving Berlin's Louisiana Purchase, one critic calling her "the hottest musical comedy hit in a decade". Zorina co-starred with Bob Hope in Paramount's 1941 film version but this also had its song content reduced (to just three numbers), though Zorina and another original cast member, Victor Moore, reprised their plaintive duet, "You're Lonely and I'm Lonely".

Her best-known musical sequence on film took place in the all-star wartime extravaganza Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), in which she danced to Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's classic "That Old Black Magic". As a GI (played by Johnny Johnston, who had the distinction of introducing the Oscar-nominated ballad on screen) falls asleep in his barracks, he dreams of Zorina, who dances from his pillow into a snow-covered setting to the choreography of Balanchine.

Paramount had put Zorina under contract, and, when a film version of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was being planned, Zorina was given the leading role of Maria, a part coveted by most of Hollywood's leading actresses, none more so than Ingrid Bergman. Since the studio had paid Sam Goldwyn a fortune to borrow his contract star Gary Cooper to play the hero, it decided to economise by using one of its own contract players opposite him.

It quickly became apparent that Zorina was too refined and lacked the ability to portray Hemingway's heroine. Later she would write of what she considered treachery and deception. After a week's shooting, she was asked by the studio to fly back to Hollywood because close-ups had revealed that she needed some dental work. While she was absent from the location, Ingrid Bergman, who had just finished filming Casablanca, was flown out for tests that confirmed her suitability. Zorina was then dismissed from the film, in which, reported Life magazine sarcastically, "no one could get her to stop being a first-rate ballet dancer". (Ironically, Bergman had not enjoyed making Casablanca, a Hollywood classic, but was overjoyed to be cast in For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of the most boring of all screen epics.)

The affair virtually ended Zorina's screen career, though she made two more films, Follow the Boys (1944), Universal's contribution to the all-star wartime series of movies, and the comedy Lover Come Back (1946).

In 1943 Zorina tried to return to a serious ballet career as a guest artist with Balanchine's Ballet Theater, where she danced Terpsichore in his Apollo, but the reaction was mixed. In 1945 she made her début as a dramatic stage actress when she played Ariel in Margaret Webster's popular production of The Tempest. In order to overcome her foreign accent, she studied for six months with a professor to train her voice and diction and to learn how to read poetry. In her autobiography she states that she drilled herself into such mechanical perfection that after impressing the director and cast at the first rehearsal she was unable to go any further in developing the role.

Zorina and Balanchine's marriage was reputedly a stormy one – the choreographer was noted for the attachments he would form for some of his star ballerinas – and they divorced in 1946. The couple continued to be devoted to one another, though each of them married others. Zorina's book indicates that he was the love of her life, and she was at his bedside as he was dying.

Her marriage to Goddard Lieberson, the president of Columbia Records and producer of many of the label's classic Broadway show albums, was more enduring and lasted from 1946 until his death in 1977. They led an active social life in a spacious town house in Manhattan and an adobe ranch house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and had two sons.

In 1954 Zorina returned to Broadway in a revival of On Your Toes, but the libretto was heavily criticised and it ran for only eight weeks. Afterwards, she directed her artistic energies to other areas. In 1947 she had been signed by the Philharmonic to appear as the narrator in the American premiere of Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher (Joan of Arc at the Stake), which she also recorded.

Later she appeared in opera houses all over the world narrating with symphony orchestras (in English, French or German) such works as the Honegger, Stravinsky's Persephone and William Walton and Edith Sitwell's Façade. She also directed operas, and in 1974, at the request of Norwegian television, she flew to Oslo where she directed the 12th-century drama Herod.

In 1988 the Metropolitan Museum presented a series entitled Zorina and Balanchine: the movie years, screening the four films in which they were teamed. Interviewed at the time, Zorina stated that she felt Balanchine's contribution should be re-assessed:

His commercial activity has been soft-pedalled, considered as something that he did only to earn money, and because he was so much in love with me. The thing is, he enjoyed it. And the more I worked with him, the more I learned. By the time I danced very well, I stopped.

In 1991 Zorina married the harpsichordist Paul Wolfe and they lived in Santa Fe, where she continued a career as an opera director for several troupes, including the Santa Fe Opera.

Tom Vallance