Henry (Harry) Neville Haythorne MBE

ATTENDED PULTENEY GRAMMAR SCHOOL 1933 - 1941

Harry was born on 7 October, 1926. He started his education at Pulteney aged six. Although dance and music were not taught at Pulteney, he received training in dancing, singing, acting and music from outside sources and was well known for tap dancing at school. As a teenager he was a member of a vaudeville show, Harold Raymond’s Varieties that toured country areas. Shortly after Harry’s 18th birthday in 1944, he joined the RAAF and was posted to Queensland until his discharge in July 1946. After the war he took up the serious study of ballet and travelled to Britain to pursue it further. He studied with Anna Northcote, Stanislaw Idzikowski and Audrey de Vos, and danced in big musicals such as Can Can and The Pyjama Game. He performed with the Metropolitan Ballet, the International Ballet and was Ballet Master and a Principal Dancer in the ballet companies of Leonide Massine and Walter Gore as well as the Dutch National Ballet. In the 1960s Harry was also guest artist with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and Marquis de Cuevas Company in Paris and then Ballet Master at Sadler’s Wells Opera, Western Theatre Ballet and Assistant Artistic Director of Scottish National Ballet. He also worked as a choreographer and ballet master in film and television. In 1975 Harry was made Artistic Director with the Queensland Ballet. He produced established classics and commissioned new works from international and Australian choreographers including Graeme Murphy and Garth Welch.

In 1978 he became founding coordinator of dance studies at Queensland University of Technology and in 1981 was appointed artistic director of Royal New Zealand Ballet, a position he held until 1992.

In the 1990s he returned to Australia and lived in Melbourne where he continued to teach and made guest appearances in cameo roles with the Australian Ballet including Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker, Tivoli and Swan Lake, Stanton Welch’s Cinderella and Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow.

In 1993 he was awarded an MBE for services to dance and in 2001 was awarded the Australian Dance Award, awarded for outstanding dance by a male dancer for his performance in Tivoli. His final public performance was in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake in 2013, at age 87.

Harry Haythorne died in Melbourne on 24 November 2014, at age 88. LEGENDS PULTENEY