Roland Petit’s Telegraph Obit

Roland Petit and Cyd Charisse in Black Tights 1960

This obit provides a more European perspective on RP’s life.

The Telegraph
Wednesday 13 July, 2011
Theatre Obituaries

Roland Petit

Roland Petit, the choreographer who died on July 10 aged 87, was France's major creative figure in post-war ballet, responsible for defining a new French chic and erotic frankness in dance, typified above all by his wife, the glamorous star Zizi Jeanmaire. He was also probably the favorite choreographer of the world's greatest ballerinas.

An outstanding classical dancer as a youth, Roland Petit swiftly decided on a career as a rebel against the traditionalism of the Paris Opera Ballet, and before the age of 25 had created two of his most iconic ballets, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and Carmen, with the sultry young Jeanmaire as the lethal female destroying a hapless male in both.

These ballets caused a sensation worldwide and Petit and Jeanmaire swiftly became the most exciting names in French dance, closely associating with Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf, Yves Montand and the new intellectuals of Left Bank Paris.

However Petit was also wooing Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina of Sadler's Wells Ballet, with whom he was having an affair. Fonteyn had cosmetic surgery to shorten her nose at his suggestion (though the operation was redone in London). When still in her twenties, she seriously considered leaving London to join him in Paris, which prompted his other mistress, Jeanmaire, to issue him with an ultimatum.

To reassure Jeanmaire, Petit created Carmen, an encapsulation of Bizet's opera in ballet, which premiered in 1949 at the Prince's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and became an instant world hit. Jeanmaire bobbed her hair short and wore a scant black corset, which, coupled with the candid seductiveness of her pas de deux with Petit, caused both shock and delight among the crowds who rushed to see it. One observer commented that he could see men's trouser buttons popping during the performance.

But the leading English choreographer, Frederick Ashton, then developing into a classical dancemaker of genius at Covent Garden, mourned that he would be seen as out of date.

Fonteyn herself soon decided that a Parisian ballet life with Petit would be more about style and short-term effects than about durably challenging choreography, and she resumed her career with the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

Petit and Renée Jeanmaire married in 1954, and the choreographer reinvented her as "Zizi", one of the immortal icons of Parisian nightlife.

Roland Petit was born on January 13 1924 in Villemomble, a Paris suburb, the elder son of a French café owner and an Italian shoemaker. His mother, Rose Repetto, would leave to set up the Repetto dance shoe business, now an international concern. His father,

Edmond Petit, encouraged his young son in dance lessons and at just 16 he was accepted by the Paris Opera Ballet, then suffering the first straits of the Second World War.

Fast-tracked as a soloist by the director Serge Lifar (Diaghilev's last protégé) the teenager was much influenced by the cosmopolitan artistic intellectualism erupting in wartime Paris, and was taken under the wing of two leading Diaghilev associates, Jean Cocteau and Boris Kochno.

At the end of the war, aged 21 and with backing from his father, Petit founded the anti-establishment Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, taking two unorthodox but brilliant young dancers with him, Jean Babilée and Renée Jeanmaire, who would become icons of the new French dance.

Petit reinvented the suffering, virginal ballerina as a provocative, irresistible femme fatale of the modern day. His post-war works remain some of his most enduring, Les Forains, Le Jeune Homme et la mort (for Babilée), Les demoiselles de la nuit (for Fonteyn in Paris), Carmen, Le Loup, Cyrano de Bergerac and Notre-Dame de Paris, boldly theatrical in design, all recently performed by Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet among other companies.

When Petit and Jeanmaire toured the Ballets de Paris to Hollywood in 1955 his charm conquered Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, among others. Showered with Hollywood invitations, to Jeanmaire's chagrin he chose a younger lookalike, Leslie Caron, to be the lead in his 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs. He also choreographed the films Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye and Zizi Jeanmaire, The Glass Slipper, again for Caron, and Folies-Bergère, with Jeanmaire and Eddie Constantine.

He made the film Black Tights (1960) to show Zizi Jeanmaire's magnetic balletic gifts alongside Cyd Charisse and Moira Shearer, but he now set about reinventing the Paris revue around his wife, exploring new levels of luxury and sophistication for her many talents. Not only did Jeanmaire dance like an angel in any style, dressed flamboyantly (and sometimes minimally) by costumiers such as Erté, but she possessed an alluring singing voice and a worldly verbal wit that sold countless records.

They became the power couple of Sixties Parisian cultural life, wearing Yves Saint Laurent and collaborating with Andy Warhol.

Petit briefly returned to his alma mater, the Paris Opera Ballet, as director in 1970, but quit after a few months to buy the Casino de Paris specifically to feature Zizi in a supercharged new kind of music-hall, which flourished for five years.

In 1972 he took up leadership of the Ballet de Marseille, to which for the next 25 years the world's major ballerinas beat a trail, Maya Plisetskaya, Natalia Makarova, Alessandra Ferri and Altynai Asylmuratova among them, seeking to dance his flagrantly attractive female roles.

Meanwhile his early ballets proved a magnet for the great male ballet stars of the 1970s. Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov filmed Le Jeune Homme and Carmen, each partnering the evergreen Jeanmaire. Later Petit would choreograph for Baryshnikov's 1985 feature film White Nights.

In Britain, however, Roland Petit remained derided as a showman, compared unfavorably with the Royal Ballet's choreographers Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan. Petit created three ballets for Covent Garden, the slight Ballabile (1950), and two late Fonteyn-Nureyev vehicles, a pop-art Paradise Lost (which Mick Jagger loved) and a Pelléas et Mélisande, both of which were given discouraging critical receptions.

English National Ballet offers a rare British viewing of his more durable works, Carmen, Le Jeune Homme et la mort and L'Arlèsienne, at the London Coliseum next week, which Petit was overseeing when he died at home in Geneva.

Among his unusual ventures were the only ballet Orson Wells ever devised, The Lady in the Ice (1953, London), a 1972 Pink Floyd ballet and a Swan Lake with male swans (1998).

Among his many honours, Roland Petit was a Commander of the Légion d'honneur and a Commander of the French Order of Merit. His wife, now 87, and their daughter, Valentine Petit, survive him.