The cover story of the September 1970 issue of Dance Magazine was a lengthy profile of Tamara Toumanova, who was to appear the next month in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a world-renowned ballerina who approaches Holmes not with a mystery, but a proposition that he father her child. Director Billy Wilder cast her after seeing her dance; for the film, she performed the Act II pas de deux from Swan Lake opposite Nicholas Benton.
Tamara Toumanova in the film Tonight We Sing, portraying Anna Pavlova dancing The Dragonfly. Photo from the DM Archives.
It was not her first film role—she had already portrayed both Anna Pavlova, who had put her onstage as a very young child and whose iconic Dying Swan solo Toumanova learned from Fokine himself, and French actress Gaby Deslys, and appeared in films directed by Gene Kelly and Alfred Hitchcock—and it was far from the “baby ballerina”-turned-international-star’s most unusual performance.
In 1952, she performed The Dying Swan for French president Vincent Auriol and invited dignitaries at Château de Chambord—entirely on a centuries-old Gobelins tapestry brought from the Louvre for the occasion. “I felt terribly guilty, stepping on that beautiful, priceless tapestry, especially with all the rosin I had to use on account of the slippery metallic threads,” Toumanova recalled. “But I couldn’t dare risk slipping in those noble surroundings, in that poetic work, before such a distinguished audience.”
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