1. Lynn Seymour originated lead roles for several ballets by Frederick Ashton, including The Two Pigeons, Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan and A Month in the Country.
18 Facts About Lynn Seymour
1. 2.
Lynn Seymour guested with various ballet companies throughout her life.
3.
Seymour was born in Wainwright, Alberta, as Berta Lynn Springbett, and studied ballet in Vancouver, British Columbia.
4.
Lynn Seymour joined Covent Garden Opera Ballet in 1956 and moved to the Touring Royal Ballet in 1957.
5.
Lynn Seymour's first created role was the Adolescent in Kenneth MacMillan's study of Anne Frank's diary, The Burrow, which gained her prominence.
6.
Lynn Seymour was prima ballerina at the Berlin Opera Ballet under MacMillan's direction, where she danced the first performance of his Concerto, whose second movement was inspired by her magnetic plasticity, and created the turbulent role of Anna Anderson in the one-act version of Anastasia.
7.
Lynn Seymour guested with various companies, including the London Festival Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, National Ballet of Canada, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and American Ballet Theatre.
8.
Lynn Seymour worked with different choreographers from John Cranko, Antony Tudor and Jerome Robbins to Glen Tetley, Lar Lubovitch and Roland Petit and was often partnered by her beloved friend Rudolf Nureyev.
9.
Lynn Seymour was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1976 Birthday Honours and won the Evening Standard Drama Award the following year.
10.
Lynn Seymour became a choreographer while still dancing, creating her first ballet Night Ride, with music from Michael Finnissy, for the Royal Ballet Choreographic Group in 1973.
11.
From 1978 to 1980, Lynn Seymour was artistic director of the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich, where she invited a young William Forsythe to join her.
12.
In 1980, Richard Austin published an authorised biography and, four years later, Seymour herself wrote an autobiography, Lynn, with Paul Gardner.
13.
Lynn Seymour acted in the children's television series The Little Vampire between 1986 and 1987.
14.
Lynn Seymour appeared as an actress in the 1987 Herbert Ross film Dancers with Mikhail Baryshnikov and in Wittgenstein by Derek Jarman, playing the part of Ballets Russes's Lydia Lopokova.
15.
Lynn Seymour created a rock dance called Seymour's Circus and came back to the stage in Gillian Lynne's A Simple Man with Northern Ballet Theatre, in Escape at Sea with Second Stride and with Adventures in Motion Pictures in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and Cinderella.
16.
In 1989, at the invitation of Peter Schaufuss of the English National Ballet, Lynn Seymour came out of retirement to dance for the first time as Tatiana in Cranko's Onegin in London and again the title role of MacMillan's Anastasia that earned her a rapturous ovation in New York.
17.
Lynn Seymour married three times and had three children: twin boys Adrian and Jerszy Lynn Seymour by Polish dancer Eike Walcz whom she did not marry, and a son by her second husband.
18.
Lynn Seymour died in London on 7 March 2023, one day shy of her 84th birthday.