ABSTRACT
Barry Grantham has combined a career as a dancer and an eccentric comic. His father was an actor and assistant director at one time to Alfred Hitchcock, and also played the role of ‘Pierrot Noir’ in Houseman’s Love in a Dutch Garden. He wrote a Pierrot scenario for his son, then aged twelve, and produced him in the role for professional performances. By the age of fourteen Barry was performing a solo comedy-character act in the English northern club circuit, and was sent to dancing lessons, so that he could end his act with a comedy dance. The lessons took over and he learnt to dance properly; he soon found himself engaged to dance in films such as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, in which he was featured respectively as the ‘Baby Puppet’ and a Debureau-type Pierrot, before finally becoming part of the Monte Carlo Ballet. Here he became for a time the protégé of Stanislas Idzicowski, himself the technical successor to Nijinski in that company. Noting Grantham’s penchant for comedy, Idzicowski showed him the traditional forms of the commedia dell’arte. In particular he coached Barry in the role of Harlequin, which he in turn had learnt from the Italian ballet master, Enrico Cecchetti.
