The Life and Legend of Agnes De Mille: America's Choreographer and Dancer

"She was a born communicator" (Barnes 3). If any one sentence could sum up this amazing lady, that would be it. Agnes de Mille has been an inspiration to many up and coming choreographers with her simple and energetic movements that depict scenes from everyday life with a little more spunk.

Agnes De Mille was born on West 11^th Street, Manhattan in 1905. Her father was a famous playwright in New York. His name was William Churchill de Mille, and he wrote plays for David Belasco on Broadway. When Agnes was still very young, her uncle, Cecil Blount de Mille, who was a famous film director, convinced the family to move out west to Hollywood (the land of opportunity in show business), where her father became a film producer. When Agnes was old enough, she went to school at the Hollywood School for Girls. It was a small private school that she graduated from in 1922. Like many little girls, especially girls that grow up around movie stars, Agnes wanted to be an actress. But Hollywood can be harsh on dreams and she was told that she would never make it because she wasn't pretty enough to get her face on the big screen. Around that time Agnes saw Anna Pavelona and was awed by the performance. Forgetting acting, she decided that she wanted to be a dancer. Unfortunately for Agnes, it wasn't considered proper for a girl to earn money dancing. You have to remember, this was the early 1900's and dancing was something a girl did for fun, not for a job if she was respectable. Luckily for us, her sister's arches in her feet fell and the doctor prescribed ballet lessons to strengthen the muscles in her feet. Since her parents were allowing her sister, Margaret, to take lessons, they had to let Agnes. Agnes was just turning into a young teenager then. She loved the dance lessons, but it turned out that she wasn't that good. She herself said that she was a perfectly rotten dancer.

Her instructor, Theodore Kosloff, was considered by Agnes and many others to be a great dancer, and Agnes talked her uncle Cecil into hiring him for his film, "The Woman God Forgot". He was also in Cecil de Mille's movie, "Fool's Paradise" along with many others.