Joan Gadsdon

Joan Margaret Anne Gadsdon (23 April 1923 – 12 October 2003) was an Australian ballet dancer, actor and artist. She was one of the pioneers of early Australian ballet in the 1940s, performing with the newly established Kirsova and Borovansky ballet companies. After emigrating to Great Britain she achieved minor theatrical fame in 1953 in London by stepping in at the last moment to save the famous British stage musical The Boy Friend from almost certain oblivion. She continued to appear to some acclaim in the show in its West End run before retiring from the stage in 1959.

Early life

Joan Gadsdon was born in Lithgow, New South Wales, Australia on 23 April 1923, the second of four children of James Boswell Gadsdon, a steelworker, and his wife Josephine Elizabeth Gadsdon née Fairhall. The family was working class and often poor.

On leaving school with no qualifications at the age of 12, she was increasingly ambitious to train to be both an artist and a dancer, but filled time with a succession of low-paid jobs. She was 14 when the family moved to Sydney. Gadsdon started with the company, in the corps de ballet, in 1942 at the age of 19. Edouard Borovansky, this company eventually became the first national Australian ballet company, The Australian Ballet. Gadsdon performed with the company in Melbourne and Brisbane, and then on a six-month tour of New Zealand. The repertoire included Giselle, Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, En Saga, Capriccio Italien, Frederick Ashton's Façade, and Borovansky's symphonic fantasy, Vltava. In 1945, the company toured mainland Australia again with dates in Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Sydney. This tour included an 8-month season in Melbourne featuring Le Carnaval, Schéhérazade and Le Beau Danube – as well as a new work by Borovansky, Terra Australis. Soon after she joined, the company went on a five-month tour of the Midlands and Northern Ireland, playing the stages of large cinemas as well as conventional theatres, on a weekly basis, to regularly full houses. The repertoire included Masque of Comus, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. but though rehearsals began the company did not become a performing reality. She moved on to Barcelona where she joined a ballet company formed by the choreographer Nina Verchinina which went on a five-week tour of northern Spain, visiting Bilbao, Santander, Burgos, Valladolid, Gijón, Avilés, Oviedo, Benavente, Salamanca and Palencia, but at the end of the tour this company, too, closed, and Gadsdon returned penniless to London in November 1949.

Cabaret, variety and film

Gadsdon then formed a dance partnership with a Russian dancer. The work was a combination of ballroom dancing and complicated acrobatic lifts, some of them quite dangerous. In March 1950 the act went on a tour of US army bases in West Germany. A tour of India followed. at Teddington Studios in which her dance partner was John Heawood, who was to become an important influence on her career. Work on another film, The Crimson Pirate, followed, also filmed at Teddington Studios.

John Heawood then introduced Gadsdon to The Players' Theatre, a Victorian pastiche music hall in London's West End. Here she appeared in their 1951 Christmas pantomime and in a number of music hall bills over the first few months of 1952.

She then formed another dance act, this time with an Australian, appearing in 1952 as Anton and Yolette in successful seasons at Edmundo Ros' Coconut Grove club in London and long summer shows in Glasgow and Edinburgh before the duo amicably broke up.

December 1952 through to March 1953 saw Gadsdon in pantomime in Sheffield with the double act Morecambe and Wise.

The Boy Friend

Gadsdon was out of work in April 1953 when she received a late-night telephone call from her dancer/choreographer friend John Heawood. The Players' Theatre had commissioned the English composer, lyricist and dramatist Sandy Wilson to write a 1920s pastiche musical to be performed for a three-week season. The show was to be called The Boy Friend. During the final dress rehearsal the leading lady collapsed and was taken to hospital. Her understudy took over the part but there was no-one to take on the role previously being played by the understudy at the following night's first performance before an audience.

Heawood, who was choreographing the show, asked Gadsdon if she could be at the Players' Theatre early the following morning for dress fittings, and then learn the dialogue, stage moves, dances, music and lyrics during the day and appear in the opening performance before an invited audience the same night. Gadsdon later recalled that her reply was "When in doubt, say yes". She learned the part of Fay in the few hours left before the opening. Another obituarist noted that in taking over the part at such short notice "she earned a small but significant place in the history of musical theatre".

The subsequent opening night was a huge success and in her speech from the stage at the end, the director, Vida Hope, congratulated Gadsdon. "Joan Gadsdon walked into this theatre yesterday morning, knowing nothing of the production, and tonight has given a faultless performance." Gillian Lynne and Richard Waring. The second, The Domino Revue, was staged at the New Wimbledon Theatre. Other performers included Evelyn Laye, Miriam Karlin and Ron Moody.

In October 1953 The Boy Friend reappeared, improved and extended, with a new dance number especially choreographed for Gadsdon. The show opened again at the Players' Theatre and then moved to the Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage in London on 1 December. This new version attracted the attention of theatre owners and producers, and it opened in the West End at Wyndham's Theatre on 14 January 1954. It proved to be a notable, long-running success, ultimately being at the time the third-longest running musical in West End history. A review reported that "Joan Gadsdon and Stephen Warwick danced the Carnival Tango with as much sinuous camp as ever". In her unpublished autobiography, Gadsdon wrote: "As we stood holding hands and singing the final chorus of the song I felt unbelievably sad. We waved goodbye to the audience, the curtain came down and my little moment of glory was over. I had loved every minute of it.

Though living in Britain from 1948 to 2003, Gadsdon did not apply for British citizenship and kept her Australian citizenship until her death.

While undergoing a series of strokes, Gadsdon benefited from periods of respite care at the actors' care home Denville Hall in West London. She died in St Mary's Hospital in London on 12 October 2003. She was 80. She was cremated at Kensal Green Crematorium. Her ashes were then taken to Australia and interred next to her mother's grave in Lithgow General Cemetery.

Gadsdon's papers, including her unpublished autobiography, were deposited variously in the National Library of Australia and the Department of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (where cataloguing work is still in progress).