Anne Heaton (1930-2020). British ballerina and teacher

Anne Heaton was born in Rawalpindi, India, in 1930. She studied with Janet Cranmore in Birmingham from1937 until 1943, and then with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. Her debut was with the Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1945 in The Bartered Bride, and she became a soloist with Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in 1946. That year, Heaton created roles in two ballets by Andrée Howard (Assembly Ball and Mardi Gras) and in Celia Franca’s Khadra. In 1947, she created a role in Frederick Ashton’s Valses Nobles et sentimentales. She transferred to Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1948, where she specialised in romantic roles, for example, in Les Sylphides and Giselle. She created the Woman in MacMillan’s The Burrow in 1958 and the Wife in his Invitation in 1960. Heaton resigned from The Royal Ballet in 1959 because of a foot injury, but continued to dance intermittently until 1962.

After her retirement, Heaton taught at the Arts Educational School, and staged ballets from time to time, including Giselle in Tehran in 1971. Having married Royal Ballet dancer John Field, who later became director of The Royal Ballet Touring Company, she co-directed the British Ballet Organization with him from 1984 until 1991. Field died in 1991 and Heaton in 2020.