The duvet story of the September 1970 challenge of Dance Journal was a prolonged profile of Tamara Toumanova, who was to seem the following month within the movie The Personal Lifetime of Sherlock Holmes as a world-renowned ballerina who approaches Holmes not with a thriller, however a proposition that he father her baby. Director Billy Wilder forged her after seeing her dance; for the movie, she carried out the Act II pas de deux from Swan Lake reverse Nicholas Benton.
It was not her first movie function—she had already portrayed each Anna Pavlova, who had put her onstage as a really younger baby and whose iconic Dying Swan solo Toumanova discovered from Fokine himself, and French actress Gaby Deslys, and appeared in movies directed by Gene Kelly and Alfred Hitchcock—and it was removed from the “child ballerina”-turned-international-star’s most uncommon efficiency.
In 1952, she carried out The Dying Swan for French president Vincent Auriol and invited dignitaries at Château de Chambord—completely on a centuries-old Gobelins tapestry introduced from the Louvre for the event. “I felt terribly responsible, stepping on that lovely, priceless tapestry, particularly with all of the rosin I had to make use of on account of the slippery metallic threads,” Toumanova recalled. “However I couldn’t dare danger slipping in these noble environment, in that poetic work, earlier than such a distinguished viewers.”
