Agnes de Mille

Agnes de Mille put dance into the middle of the American musical and made a ballet about a woman who murdered her parents with an axe. She was the niece of Cecil B. DeMille and the daughter of a screenwriter, was told she was too plain and too short for the stage, and spent her twenties and thirties failing to get work in England and America. Rodeo, made for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942 to a Copland score, is a comedy about a cowgirl who cannot get a partner, and it earned twenty-two curtain calls. Rodgers and Hammerstein saw it and hired her for Oklahoma! the following year, where the dream ballet at the end of the first act is the moment American musicals started using dance to carry plot and interior life rather than to fill a break. Carousel, Brigadoon and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes followed. Fall River Legend in 1948 is her Lizzie Borden ballet, made on Nora Kaye. She was a founder of the American Guild of Musical Artists and fought for choreographers to hold rights in their own work, which they largely had not. She had a stroke in 1975 an hour before a concert, went on anyway, and wrote thirteen books, several of them classics of dance literature. Oklahoma! ran for more than two thousand performances and she was paid a flat fee with no royalty, which is part of why she fought over choreographers rights afterwards. Her books include Dance to the Piper and a life of Martha Graham. She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1980.

• Lived: 1905 CE – 1993 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist