Nini Theilade, Dancer in Reinhardt’s ‘Dream,’ Dies at 102

Nini Theilade, who won wide acclaim for her dancing in the fabled 1935 film version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” then performed with Leonide Massine’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo during its tour of the United States as World War II was beginning, died Feb. 13 in Svendborg, Denmark. She was 102.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Danish Embassy in Washington.

Theilade was performing solo recitals as young as 14. In an interview for the 2005 documentary “Ballets Russes,” she recalled how those recitals opened a big door.

“Max Reinhardt, he discovered me, so to speak,” she said, “because he saw one of these recitals, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about dancing, but this person doesn’t only dance, she acts.'”

Reinhardt put her in the version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he staged in England and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and then in the film that he and William Dieterle directed. Theilade was the lead fairy among Titania’s attendants.

The film had a starry, somewhat improbable cast that included Mickey Rooney as Puck, James Cagney as Bottom, Dick Powell as Lysander and, in her first film, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia. Critics differed on whether it succeeded, but virtually everyone agreed the dancing was a high point, especially Theilade’s work.

In a 2013 article in The Observer of London, dance writer Luke Jennings put the fairy ballet at No. 5 on his list of the 10 best dance numbers in film, singling out Theilade.

“Reinhardt and cinematographer Hal Mohr perfectly capture the evanescent quality of her dancing,” he wrote, “especially in the ballet’s closing moments, as her long, pliant arms waver like a dying flame.”

Nini Arlette Johanna Theilade was born June 15, 1915, in Purwokerto, on the island of Java in what is now Indonesia, to Hans Theilade and the former Johanna Catarina Wijnschenk-Dom.

The family relocated to Copenhagen in 1925, and Theilade began ballet training, making her solo debut in the Netherlands in 1929. She toured Europe and the United States before being cast in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In addition to being a dancer, Theilade was a choreographer, creating several works for the Royal Danish Ballet in the second half of the 1930s.

“She developed the ballet-trained dancers into more soft movements with a gliding energy,” Eva Tarp, a longtime friend who studied under her in the 1970s, said by email.

In 1938, Theilade benefited from a rift among the men who several years earlier had revived Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Massine became artistic director of a group that split off to form the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and, looking for dancers to fill out the new company, brought in Theilade.

The outbreak of World War II forced the group to the Americas, where it toured on a grueling schedule. Massine featured Theilade in several of the adventurous works he created, including “Bacchanale,” a 1939 piece with a set by Salvador Dalí that included a huge swan. Theilade, as Venus, made her entrance by sliding out of the swan’s womb, a body stocking making her appear naked.

That memorable moment became even more so at one performance, as she recalled in the “Ballets Russes” documentary. A Yugoslav diplomat had been backstage before the performance visiting someone in the company, a multinational troupe, and he took his leave as the show began.

“He left, puts on his hat, goes and thinks he’s backstage,” she said, “and walks straight onto the stage, just at that moment that I come through the womb.”

“He looks at me, and I look at him,” she continued. “He takes off his hat, and he says, ‘How do you do, madam?'”

Tarp said Theilade stayed with the company only until 1940, when she married Peter Loopuyt, a financier. They lived in Rio de Janeiro and then Portugal. Loopuyt died in the mid-1960s, and Theilade eventually returned to Denmark, starting a ballet school on the island of Funen in 1970.

In 1979, she and her second husband, Arne Buchter-Larsen, whom she had married in 1967, moved to France and founded another dance school, the Académie de Ballet Nini Theilade in Lyon. After her husband’s death in 1987 she returned to Denmark and to still more teaching, at Skolerne I Oure Sport & Performing Arts.

“She had an astute and intelligent directness as a teacher and conveyor of the art form of dance,” Nikolaj Hubbe, artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, said by email. “Her lifelong passion and curiosity for dance that went beyond her own career is certainly a testimony to her unselfish keeping of that very artistic flame.”

She is survived by a son, Peter; four grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. A daughter, Joan, died in 2016.

In 2000, Theilade attended a Ballets Russes reunion in New Orleans and, in her mid-80s, led a class for young dancers. Dan Geller, who directed “Ballets Russes” with Dayna Goldfine, began filming the documentary there, and remembered her lively presence.

“She was whirling through the studio with vigor,” he said in a telephone interview, “and not holding back at all.”