ROBERT HELPMANN
Michael Powell remembers
the choreographer who died this week
MICHAEL Powell, dictating a memoir of Robert Helpmann — dancer, mime, clown, wit, actor, choreographer, stage director, impresario, theatrical administra- tor, good companion and friend. On top of that (or perhaps we should say down under all that), an Australian, which is where his toughness comes from and his instinct for survival. Bobby Helpmann dead? I can't believe it. It's a joke — a deadly joke, like his barbed wit that has excoriated many over-blown reputations. Working in the theatre or the film studio, he was kind, intelligent and never at a loss. He was full of invention. The speed of his mind in the execution of his ideas was amazing. His control of his own movements was intimi- dating for other actors, and his flashes of wit took your breath away. He had a gift of mockery of the whole human condition. `Alas poor, Yorick! I knew him.' Shakespeare would have loved Bobby. It's a good thing that I'm dictating this in New York and not at my home amongst my books. By this time I would have quoted half a dozen passages which would have been the very mirror of Helpmann. Be- sides, why should I talk of Autolycus and all that, when Bobby was such a wonderful Hamlet? I can imagine the hiss of Laurence Olivier's breath as he reads these words. But I stick to my guns. Bobby's Hamlet was full of comedy, the quick dancing wit of a nobleman and a man of fashion, an undergraduate who had read everything and who knew the real world as well, the sort of young man who would risk his life on a sudden impulse. Like Larry Olivier, Bobby Helpmann had the same gift for pouncing on a particular trait of character in the part that he might be playing. Playing Hamlet in his turn, Bobby took his cue for the character from the scene with Osric, and made it glitter like a casket of jewels.
I was a young poverty-row film director when I first met Bobby. He was already one of the leading dancers of the Sadler's Wells Ballet. The Wells was a great haunt of mine. What a nest of talent there was at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in those days, all vying with each other. It was natural that actors should want to dance, and dancers should want to act. Bobby had made a huge success in the part of the Dago in William Walton's Façade. Very soon he was Margot's co-star already bringing sardonic gaiety and complicated intrigue into Miss De Valois's strict and dedicated school.
By this time I had joined Alexander Korda's London Films and was working on The Thief of Baghdad, and I knew Bobby to speak to and joke with, but no more. When the war came we became neigh- bours. Michael Benthall and Robert Help- mann were already a formidable couple, who would obviously be going places, and who could finance the development of their ideas and dreams. I became a con- fidant of Bobby's because he could see I knew where I was going too. I had a tiny house in the Mews around the corner from Chester Square and Bobby had a similar pad a little further along. I would often stroll down to him for the latest theatrical gossip, and I would brew tea when he came knocking on my door for the latest scandal in movies. We were both fire-watchers, and spent quite a bit of time shovelling the fire-bombs off our roofs and into the street onto the heads of passing wardens.
Emeric Pressburger, my partner, and I were preparing a movie, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, at that time. The story was about the crew of a Wellington bom- ber who bail out over occupied Holland, and then have somehow to get back to England after various adventures. I had a lot of friends whose talents I admired and who had never made a film at this time. They were a bit of a mixed bag, but I managed to get them all into the film. Peter Ustinov played a Dutch priest, Alec Clunes played a Dutch organist in a church, Pamela Brown played a Dutch Resistance lady (dear Pamela! — you should have heard the accent that she cooked up, and somehow got away with) and Bobby Helpmann played a Dutch Quisling traitor, and had a glorious time skimming about the floor on his knees and grabbing hold of the priest's vestments in a fine piece of over-acting that scandalised all the regular West End actors in the cast. I egged him on.
In due time, of course, Bobby played Hamlet, and it was a wonderful production by Michael Benthall and himself, and a glittering, sardonic, boyish Hamlet it was. After that there was no holding both of us. We always kept our best bits of gossip for each other all through the war years, and when Emeric and I decided to buy back The Red Shoes, the story he had written for Alexander Korda, and make it ourselves, it was naturally to Bobby that I turned for everything to do with the ballet world, and of course to dance in the ballet as well, and act as the leading male dancer of the Ballets Lermontov: Ivan Boleslaysky. The film did us both a bit of good. And thanks to Alex Korda, we all came together again on The Tales of Hoffman, in which Bobby played three or four parts (or it may have been five or six, I've lost count) with such a display of virtuosity of acting, of mime, of humour, as has seldom been seen on the screen since the great Lon Chaney, the man with a thousand faces.
After these eventual years, Bobby pas- sed out of my ken, although I often saw him, and once I flew to Australia for the sole purpose of appearing in a This Is Your Life programme which introduced among other formative influences, as if Bobby couldn't form his own life, me and The Red Shoes. His performance in G.B. Shaw's The Millionairess with Katie Hepburn, had astonished everybody except those who knew him. His direction and administra- tion of the Australian Ballet, and his frequent journeys to and fro between the hemispheres, just came naturally. And now he is dead.
Bobby dead? I don't believe it. Katie Hepburn won't believe. He burns like a bright star in my memory, a unique and extraordinary talent which, thank God, I have on film.
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