Sir Kenneth MacMillan was one of the leading ballet choreographers of his generation. He is commemorated with a blue plaque at 14 Lyford Road in Wandsworth, where he lived from about 1974 until 1980. During this time he produced many of his successful later works, including Mayerling (1978).

EARLY CAREER

MacMillan first took ballet lessons in Nottinghamshire, when his school was evacuated to Retford during the Second World War. He won a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School when he was 15 years old, and became a founding member of Ninette de Valois’s new junior company, the Sadler’s Wells Opera (later Theatre) Ballet. MacMillan was admired for his elegant classical style as dancer, but he was plagued by stage fright and turned to choreography instead.

The Burrow (1958) was his first significant work. Its gritty expressionism and atmosphere of oppression attracted attention, and critics declared it a landmark work. It was also the first ballet in which MacMillan worked with the Canadian ballerina Lynn Seymour, who would remain his muse for 20 years. Depicting the rape of a young girl, The Invitation (1960), also with Seymour, further pushed the limits of the experiences and emotions a ballet could convey.

Major works of the early 1960s included The Rite of Spring (1962), Song of the Earth (1965) and his first three-act work for the Royal Ballet, Romeo and Juliet (1965), which proved immensely successful. He had created the latter for Seymour and Christopher Gable, but to MacMillan’s disappointment they were substituted with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev – the big stars required for the American tour and film adaptation.

THE ROYAL BALLET

After a period in Berlin, where he suffered from poor mental and physical health, in 1970 MacMillan took over from Sir Frederick Ashton as Artistic Director of the Royal Ballet. During MacMillan’s directorship, he extended the repertoire of the Royal Ballet by introducing works by other choreographers as well as creating new works himself. His personal and creative life also received new stability during this time after meeting the Australian artist Deborah Williams, with whom he had a daughter in 1973 and married in 1974. Number 14 Lyford Road was their first home together.

Many of his works in the 1970s and 1980s proved too controversial for their conservative audiences. MacMillan was undeterred, however, and continued to produce works with difficult and psychologically complex topics. His subject matter included a double suicide in Mayerling (1978), the consequences of war in Gloria (1980), and the depiction of a concentration camp in Valley of Shadows (1983). His last major ballet, The Judas Tree (1992), was another controversial work about sexual violence, set in contemporary docklands. He died on 29 October 1992 from a heart attack.

MacMillan’s obituary in The Times described him as ‘a poet of the heart’s anguish and a creator of unforgettable dance imagery’. In total he created over 40 ballets and discovered many new talents, including Lynn Seymour and Darcey Bussell.