Agnes de Mille Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Agnes George de Mille was born in 1905 in New York City into a family that linked theater, cinema, and public life. Her father, William C. deMille, was a playwright and film director; her uncle, Cecil B. DeMille, became one of Hollywood's defining movie directors; and her mother, Anna George, was the daughter of the political economist Henry George. The mixture of literary ambition, stagecraft, and vigorous public debate permeated her childhood and later fed her sense that dance could carry narrative, character, and social meaning as powerfully as words.

As a girl she loved performing but did not fit the era's narrow ballet ideal. She watched film sets in California, where the family often lived for her father's work, and visited theaters in New York, absorbing repertory, stage mechanics, and the discipline of rehearsal. The breadth of that early exposure made her unusually attentive to the total fabric of a performance, music, design, pacing, and the way movement could reveal an inner life.

Training and Early Career
De Mille studied literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in the 1920s, even as she pursued serious dance training. She gave early solo recitals built around character and story, shaped by acting as much as classical technique. In the early 1930s she spent time in London, studying with teachers associated with Marie Rambert's circle and encountering the psychologically driven ballets of Antony Tudor. That experience confirmed her conviction that dance could probe motive and memory, not merely decorate a plot.

Back in the United States she choreographed for concerts and occasional commercial projects, searching for a hybrid language that welcomed tap, folk idioms, social dance, and classical ballet. The breakthrough arrived when she was asked to make a new work for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Breakthrough in Ballet
Rodeo (1942), set to a newly arranged score by Aaron Copland, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House with de Mille herself as the awkward, yearning Cowgirl. Its frontier setting, square-dance inflections, and tender comedy were not pastiche; they were an argument that American gesture and music belonged on the ballet stage. Rodeo's success opened doors with major companies and proved that her instinct for story and place could move audiences without sacrificing choreographic rigor.

In 1948 she created Fall River Legend for Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), with Morton Gould's music, recasting the Lizzie Borden narrative as a stark, tragic legend. Working with Ballet Theatre's director Lucia Chase and a roster of dramatic dancers, de Mille forged a style of "story ballet" that fused classical steps with American vernacular movement, darkened by moral ambiguity. These ballets stood alongside her theater work, each practice sharpening the other.

Broadway Innovations
The Theatre Guild brought her to Oklahoma! (1943), the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. De Mille insisted that dance not interrupt the story but carry it. Her extended dream ballet gave physical voice to the heroine's fears and desires, blending folk steps, ballet, and character gesture with a dramaturg's sense of purpose. The result helped redefine the American musical, proving that choreography could be a primary vehicle of narrative and psychology.

She followed with Carousel (1945), deepening the expressive range of dance within a musical score, and then Allegro (1947), an ambitious experiment that she directed and choreographed, using a fluid chorus and stylized staging to trace a life's moral journey. In Brigadoon (1947), working with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, she folded Highland motifs into a classical framework, again demonstrating her gift for building character and community through movement. Later projects included 110 in the Shade (1963), where she brought a drought-parched world to life in motion, using choreography to articulate hope and delusion.

Writing, Teaching, and Advocacy
Parallel to her stage work, de Mille became one of dance's clearest public voices. Her memoir Dance to the Piper (1952) opened a backstage door on the craft and politics of choreography. She later wrote books for general readers, among them The Book of the Dance and To a Young Dancer, mixing history, anecdote, and practical counsel. Late in life she published Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, a portrait of a colleague and friendly rival whose modernist path had intersected with her own in New York's charged dance community.

De Mille toured widely with lecture-demonstrations that she called conversations with the audience, using dancers onstage to show how rhythm, weight, and intention tell a story. She served as a forceful advocate for public support of the arts, lending her name and testimony to national efforts that culminated in stable funding for dance companies. Her circle included composers like Aaron Copland and Morton Gould, theater collaborators such as Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lerner, and Loewe, and ballet colleagues including Antony Tudor and Lucia Chase, figures with whom she argued, invented, and built.

Personal Life
In 1943 she married Walter F. Prude, a theatrical executive who understood the rhythm of rehearsal rooms and touring schedules. They had one son, Jonathan, and maintained a household that balanced her relentless work with family life. Her extended family remained a presence: she navigated a career in the shadow and company of William C. deMille and Cecil B. DeMille, drawing on their practical wisdom while steadily asserting a choreographer's autonomy.

Later Years and Legacy
In the mid-1970s de Mille suffered a severe stroke just after addressing an audience, an episode she later chronicled in Reprieve. The paralysis and the long rehabilitation that followed did not silence her. She returned to writing, to restagings of her major works, and to public advocacy, clarifying her ideas about technique, storytelling, and the American character in dance. Companies across the United States kept Rodeo, Fall River Legend, and her Broadway ballets in repertory, preserving her musicality, humor, and moral seriousness.

Agnes de Mille died in 1993 in New York, leaving an art that joined the private pulse of feeling to the public space of the stage. She showed that the American musical could think in movement and that ballet could speak in an American accent without losing classical depth. Through her ballets, her Broadway scores in motion, her books, and her tough-love mentorship, she gave later generations a blueprint: listen to the music of a place and its people, and let the body tell the truth.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Agnes, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Music - Free Will & Fate - Art.

Other people realated to Agnes: Oscar Hammerstein (Writer), Clive Barnes (Journalist), Cheryl Crawford (Actress), Richard Rodgers (Composer)

• Wikipedia