Agnes de Mille: Life and Work

Early Life

Agnes de Mille's career was a long, successful, and turbulent journey through the world of 20th century American theater and ballet. Born in 1905 in New York City, she was the daughter of William Churchill de Mille, a famous playwright, and Anna George, the daughter of the distinguished economist and "single tax" advocate, Henry George. Agnes' paternal grandfather, Henry de Mille, was a onetime North Carolina minister who left the pulpit to write plays with a message. He took as his partner David Belasco, one of the most successful producer-director-playwrights of the early days of this century. When de Mille was very young, her father followed his brother, Cecil B. de Mille to California, to work in the new field of motion pictures. He went for a year's stay and remained for the rest of his life.

Agnes de Mille’s early schooling in California was at the small private Hollywood School for Girls. Later she attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she graduated cum laude at age nineteen with a degree in English Literature. About this time her mother and father divorced, and her mother came back to New York to start a new life with Agnes and her sister Margaret. Margaret went to Barnard College and Agnes started her long search for success as a dancer.

Early Concert Career

Unable to find employment in the theater, de Mille composed dances for herself, while also arranging the music and designing the costumes and gave a series of solo concerts in New York and other east coast venues. Although de Mille was hailed by critics, she lost considerable money and so departed with her mother to London. In London and Europe, with Warren Leonard, she continued her concerts, again with critical praise but no financial gain. Marie Rambert and Arnold Haskell though were sufficiently enthusiastic about her progress and persuaded her to return to London the following year to study and continue performing. For the following five years, with brief sojourns back to the United States, she carried on her work and her studies in London, strengthening her technique and improving her repertory. Rambert's Ballet Club, where de Mille studied, had other future dance luminaries as pupils including Frederick Ashton, Anthony Tudor, Hugh Laing, Diana Gould and later Margot Fonteyn. Although de Mille did not earn great fame during her sojourn at the Ballet Club, her time there, had a significant artistic influence on her work.

During one of her returns to the United States, de Mille began to receive some recognition by choreographing the dances for the film Romeo and Juliet, starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. However, she later commented that the routine of cutting dances to pieces for film assured a short life for them. De Mille continued to work in London and Europe but returned to the U.S. in November 1938, where she took up her performing career in the United States, touring the country with Joseph Anthony, who later became a well-known stage director, and Sybil Shearer, considered an innovative ballet and modern dancer, who worked frequently with de Mille.

Successful Beginnings

In 1940, Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) was formed, and de Mille was a charter member, creating for the company her inaugural ballet, Black Ritual, with African-American dancers, the first time this had been done by a serious ballet company. Black Ritual (music: Creation du Monde by Milhaud) was not a success, but in the following year Miss de Mille created Three Virgins and a Devil (music by Ottorino Respighi) for Ballet Theatre, which was a tremendous hit and is still performed today to great critical acclaim.

 In 1942 she was asked by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to create a ballet for the company and her world-famous Rodeo (with its commissioned stunning score by Aaron Copland) was a sensational success, and one that markedly started off her career. She herself danced the leading role of the “Cowgirl” at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 16, 1942, and received twenty-two curtain calls and standing ovations. This triumph, with its Americana setting and invention of an American aesthetic in dance and gesture, led Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to select her to create the dances for their musical Oklahoma! (1943). The immense triumph of these two works made American dance history.

Broadway Beginnings

On June 14, 1943, Miss de Mille was married in Beverly Hills to Walter Foy Prude, a Texan. Mr. Prude at that time was an officer in the Army (Aviation Ordinance) and was stationed at Hobbes, New Mexico. He was shortly sent overseas for the duration of the war. Upon his return, de Mille and Walter Prude had a son, Jonathan Prude. Walter Prude began a career managing concert artists with Sol Hurok, directing the careers of Arthur Rubenstein, Marian Anderson, Isaac Stern, and Martha Graham, among others.

The wedding of de Mille and Prude followed on the heels of the opening of Oklahoma! (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II). To this day, it is one of the most triumphantly successful musicals in American History. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration and de Mille forever changed the history and use of dance in the American musical theater with her invention of the “Dream Ballet,” which used dance to further the plot and explore the unconscious of the characters . 

Following the premiere of Oklahoma!,  in rapid succession, de Mille choreographed the musicals One Touch of Venus, 1943 (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman), Bloomer Girl, 1944 (Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg, Sig Herzig, and Fred Saidy) and Carousel, 1945 (Rodgers and Hammerstein). The ballet, Talley-Ho, 1944, was also created during this period for American Ballet Theatre. Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (1947), continued her musical theater success, with intricate choreography using Scottish step and folk dancing as its basis. Brigadoon garnered de Mille a Tony award for best choreography and was another great work brought into the canon of twentieth century musicals. In that same year she began rehearsals for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), acting as director as well as choreographer. This was not only the first time a choreographer both choreographed and directed a Broadway show, but also the first time for a woman to take on the task. It was a huge undertaking, with a cast of nearly one hundred and in spite of the show having a respectable run of over a year, the show itself proved to be problematic for everyone involved.

Ballet and Broadway Successes

After the challenges of Allegro, de Mille continued a steady schedule of assignments: The Rape of Lucretia (1948), on Broadway, of which she was also the director. In 1948, another one of de Mille’s most definitive ballets, Fall River Legend (music by Morton Gould), based on the true story of Lizzie Borden, premiered with American Ballet Theatre to great reviews for both de Mille and the lead dancers Alicia Alonso and Nora Kaye. The Broadway musical Gentlemen Prefer Blonds (Julie Styne, Leo Robin, Joseph Fields and Anita Loos) followed in 1949; the staging of Out of This World (Cole Porter, Dwight Taylor, and Reginald Lawrence) was in 1950; choreography for Paint Your Wagon (Lerner and Loewe) in 1951; and a ballet,The Harvest According (music by Virgil Thomson) in 1952. The year 1954-1955 brought the filming of the Hollywood version of Oklahoma! with director Fred Zinnemann.

Returning from the West Coast to New York she continued to mount ballets and Broadway musicals every year, including Goldilocks, 1958 (Leroy Anderson, Jean Kerr, Walter Kerr, Joan Ford); Juno, 1959 (Marc Blitzstein and Joseph Stein); Kwamina, 1961 (Richard Adler and Robert Alan Aurther); 110 in the Shade, 1963 (Harvey Schmidt, Tom Jones and N. Richard Nash); and Come Summer, 1969 (David Baker and Will Holt) for which she choreographed and contributed to the direction. During the same period, de Mille continued creating ballets for ballet companies: The Bitter Weird, 1964 (re-working of the Brigadoon dances into a ballet); The Four Marys, 1965 (music by Trude Rittman); A Rose for Miss Emily, 1971 (music by Alan Hovhaness); Texas Fourth, 1973 (music by Harvey Schmidt); Summer, 1975 (music by Franz Schubert); and A Bridegroom Called Death, 1978 (music by Schubert, these last two ballets were later reworked into her last ballet, The Other, 1992).

The 1970s and After: Art and Survival 

During the early to mid-1970s, de Mille created a close relationship with the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, where she created the aforementioned ballets A Rose for Miss Emily and Texas Fourth. In 1974, she inaugurated the Agnes de Mille Heritage Dance Theater at the school, which successfully toured across the country, performing her ballets and concert versions of her theater work. The success of the company was to culminate in New York on May 15, 1975, with a famous lecture-performance, Conversations About the Dance. However, a severe, near fatal cerebral haemorrhage struck de Mille as she was about to go on stage, and she was left paralyzed on her left side.  De Mille recounted this experience and her extraordinary return later in her book Reprieve: A Memoir (1981, preface by her treating doctor, Fred Plum, MD).

In 1977, two years after this life-threatening stroke, de Mille returned triumphantly to the lecture-demonstration concert cut short by her attack. Conversations About the Dance was presented onstage with de Mille as narrator and starring dancers from the Joffrey Ballet, Boston Ballet, Graham company, Honi Coles, and members of her Heritage Dance Theatre, including her long time muse and principal dancer Gemze de Lappe. This evening was later produced and televised by PBS in 1980 with Gregory Peck as presenter.

Although de Mille did not return to choreographing any new original Broadway shows, she did continue to oversee and rehearse Broadway revivals of her musical theater works, such as Oklahoma! (1979) and Brigadoon (1980), in addition to her ballets performed by prominent ballet companies across the country. 

De Mille did, nevertheless, continue to create new ballets for the company where many of her works claimed their home, American Ballet Theatre. As she had done in the past, de Mille revisited and reworked narrative structure, steps and gesture from earlier dances. In the mid-1980s, she revisited her work from the musical Juno (1959), which later became the ballet The Informer, 1988 (Celtic tunes re-arranged by Trude Rittmman, John Morris, Martha Johnson and Marc Blitzstein) and was premiered by American Ballet Theatre. In 1990, de Mille returned to her earlier ballets Summer and A Bridegroom Called Death, which she reworked for American Ballet Theatre into what was to become her last ballet, The Other, 1992 (music by Schubert). From 1992 until her death in 1993, de Mille continued to work in the dance studio. She returned to one of her very early ballets from the 1940s, Talley-Ho. She was never satisfied with its ending. Unfortunately, this undertaking remained unfinished. De Mille passed away on October 7, 1993.

The Fight for Artists and the Arts

In 1959, Agnes de Mille helped to create, along with Hanya Holm, Ezra Stone and Shepard Traube, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (“SSDC”), (known since 2009, as the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (“SDC”)). This was established and continues today as an independent national labour union to represent theatrical directors and choreographers working on Broadway, National Tours, Off-Broadway, and in various professional resident, regional, stock and dinner theaters throughout the United States. The union bargained contracts with producers, and helped to set up protection of the rights for stage directors and choreographers’ work. This union was the first of its kind for stage directors and choreographers. De Mille was president for several years of the organization, and during that time, was the only woman head of a labor union in the United States. She remained throughout her life a member of the Board of Directors.

Her reputation as a speaker also grew through the years as she became and remained a prominent supporter and speaker for a government subsidy for the arts. This engagement reached a pinnacle with a speech de Mille gave at a Congressional Hearing in November 1962, which resulted in her appointment by President Kennedy to be a member of the National Advisory Committee on the Arts. This Committee, established in 1963, was the forerunner of the National Endowment for the Arts (“NEA”). De Mille was then appointed by President Johnson as a member of the National Council of the newly activated NEA, which began during his administration. Throughout the following years, de Mille spoke two more times in Congress: once in the Senate, where she delivered her plea once again for government support for the arts, and once for the Committee for Medical Research after her stroke.

Agnes de Mille, Author

De Mille was a prolific writer. She is the author of eleven books and several articles, Her first book, Dance to the Piper, published in 1952, was translated into five languages and a new edition released in 2015 in the U.S. Other books include: And Promenade Home (1956); To a Young Dancer (1962); The Book of Dance (1963); Lizzie Borden: Dance of Death (1968); Speak to Me, Dance with Me (1973); Where the Wings Grow (1978); America Dances (1980); Reprieve: A Memoir (1981); and Portrait Gallery: Artists, Impresarios and Intimates (1990). De Mille’s last work was a prodigious biography of long-time friend and colleague, Martha Graham titled Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, published in 1992.

Awards

In 1976 de Mille was awarded New York City's Handel Medallion, which is the most distinguished honor the city can bestow on its citizens. In 1980 she was given the nationally prestigious Kennedy Center Honor Award by President Carter, and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. De Mille was the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the U.S. She was also the recipient of four Donaldson Awards, the best choreography Tony Award for Brigadoon, and in 1993 accepted a special Tony award for the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma!. Among other awards are a special Drama Desk Award in 1986, three NY Drama Critics’ Circle Awards and an Emmy Award in 1987 for her work on the documentary film by Merrill Brockway, Agnes: The Indomitable de Mille.