The audition was participation in a class with the Sadler's Wells Company. The letter got him the audition, but did not fool anyone, as he discovered years later when he took over as director of the Royal Ballet and found his file in the archives. He wrote to Ninette de Valois in the name of his father. When he was 15 he found an advertisement in The Dancing Times offering scholarships for boys at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. “A lasting memory of mine”, she continued, was “watching Kenneth doing grand jetés across Yarmouth Market Place on his way home from school.” It was, she remembers “a duet with chairs to I love a Piano ”. “I didn't know what I was going to do when I grew up until I met Phyllis Adams.” Adams realised that she had a prodigiously talented pupil and MacMillan created his first choreography on Adams’ daughter, Wendy and a friend. “She treated me as an adult, which was wonderful”, MacMillan said in a 1991 interview.
She taught him for free and, in effect, shaped his ambitions. We got on all right, but he was a rather strict Scottish gentleman, rather remote and unemotional, especially to me.” “A lasting memory of mine was watching Kenneth doing grand jetés across Yarmouth Market Place on his way home from school.” wendy adamsĪ dance teacher in Great Yarmouth, Phyllis Adams, became, in effect his surrogate mother. From that moment on, I felt that I was on my own. ''I remember coming back for my first school holiday to Yarmouth, and was met at the station by my father and my sister, who told me my mother had died the previous night.
He was soon obsessed and devouring back issues of The Dancing Times in the local library.Įdith MacMillan, who suffered from chronic epilepsy, died in 1942. In Retford, he took tap lessons from Jean Thomas, a local dance teacher, who encouraged him to try ballet. He had already learnt tap and Scottish country dancing and taken part in entertainments for soldiers at American air force bases. The school was evacuated to Retford in Nottinghamshire and it was here that he first discovered ballet. The Second World War had begun and Great Yarmouth was repeatedly bombed by the Luftwaffe. When Kenneth was 11, he won a scholarship to the local grammar school. The family fled the farm in the middle of the night (“a moonlight flit”) and went south to Norfolk, to live in Great Yarmouth, where William could only find occasional work during the Depression years of the 1930s. Instead, he tried and failed as a chicken farmer. After William, a coal miner, was gassed in the conflict, mining was no longer possible for him. His parents, William and Edith MacMillan, had met in Norfolk where William was briefly stationed, en route to France, during the First World War. While you’ll find our products for eyes, face, lips and nails sold by around 4,000 stores in 40 countries, the ambition is to continuously grow into a worldwide brand, offering more women quality makeup.He was born in Dunfermline, Fife on 11 December 1929. The heart of the business is based in Malmö, Sweden, where both global production and distribution takes place, with additional production in Switzerland. In 2018 IsaDora was acquired Axcel, a private Nordic equity firm and today the company lives on with the pursuit to empower and enable more people to embrace and express their personal beauty – without having to compromise on price and quality. Ultimately, this is what inspired and motivated the company to establish its mission of making high quality, clinically tested, fragrance-free beauty more accessible to all. At that time, unscented products in a wide range of colors weren’t readily available either. IsaDora was founded in Sweden in 1983 with the belief that makeup shouldn’t be a luxury for only a select few to enjoy.