The theatre director who talent-spotted Barry Humphries

ELEANOR FAZAN: 1930 - 2024

Eleanor Fazan, who has died aged 93, was a director and choreographer who became something of a legendary figure in the theatre and opera world – but was little known outside.

Over a career of 60 years, “Fiz”, as she was known, contributed more to theatre, dance, opera and cinema than many household names. In a memoir, Fiz and Some Theatre Giants (2013), she recalled collaborations with an impressive list of brilliant, often difficult men, from the music-hall star George Robey to Herbert von Karajan and including, among others, Lindsay Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Schlesinger, Barry Humphries and Laurence Olivier. “I have always been drawn towards those who needed to kick up, those who just couldn’t toe the party line,” she recalled.

Kenyan-born British actress and choreographer Eleanor Fazan outside the law courts in London,1965.Credit: Getty

Eleanor Henta Fazan was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 29, 1930. Her father’s family came to Britain as Huguenot refugees; an ancestor fought as a midshipman at the Battle of Trafalgar, and her father was S.H. Fazan, CMG CBE, twice provincial commissioner in Kenya, a pro-African who was disparaged by the white settlers, and posthumous author of Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change. Her mother, Sylvia, was a scion of the family of the Victorian painter James Clarke Hook.

She was home-taught until 10, when she attended Limuru Girls’ School. The first chorus line she saw was a Ngoma danced by Kikuyu tribesmen. She was a natural dancer, and was sent to London at the age of 15 when her parents divorced. There she trained at Sadlers Wells Theatre and later the Cone Ripman School (now the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts).

Her first job came in 1948 as a dancer in a line of 12 in George Robey’s The Windmill Man on a provincial tour. She was paid £10 a week for two shows a day when her rent was three guineas a week for a shared room. It was the 79-year-old music hall star, Bransby Williams, who challenged Eleanor Fazan to raise her sights with: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a profession like this?”

Barbara Pearce, Tamara Kirova, and Eleanor Fazan on River Thames. 1950.Credit: Getty

In 1955, she married the musician Stanley Myers, but the auguries were not good. Her mother-in-law, Ida Zellermyer, did not want a “shiksa” (Gentile) in the family and addressed her in the third person. Nevertheless, Fazan recalled that it was Myers who, even after their divorce in the early 1960s, “was the wind in my sails ... I started to take jobs I would never have dreamed of taking without his being there”.

Her career break came in 1956 when she became choreographer and then director of the satirical musical Grab Me A Gondola, one of the first to use rock music, at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and she employed Myers as musical director. The young Queen Elizabeth brought a party to see the show, and on stage afterwards, when the Queen asked Fazan what it was that had made her decide to become a director, she replied that she had put on so much weight during pregnancy that no one would employ her as a dancer. Both burst out laughing.

The cast of Beyond The Fringe (from top left) Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.

More importantly, Donald Albery saw the show and moved it to London, where it ran for almost two years. Over the next two decades, she would direct many successful shows for the impresario.

By 1958, she was the first female director with three shows running in the West End, while Myers was still struggling to make his mark. When their marriage broke down in the early 1960s, she took their son Nicolas and the nanny, Luisa, to live with the actor Nigel Davenport, whom she had met at the Royal Court and with whom she had begun a relationship.

Next, Albery asked her to rescue and “brush up” the undergraduate comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, which had been a success in Edinburgh but was in danger of dying in the provinces. The cast (Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore), she decided, was brilliant, and she recalled that she had never laughed so much as during rehearsals. But “the script was nil and each member of the cast really wanted to do his own thing”.

The show was substantially rewritten and restructured. With Bennett a dotty vicar (“For Esau was an hairy man”); Cook an RAF officer telling Miller to “get up in a crate… pop over to Bremen, take a shufti” and “don’t come back” because “we need a futile gesture”; and Moore singing a take-off of a Benjamin Britten song as if sung by Peter Pears, it was a huge hit at the Fortune Theatre in London in 1961. It transferred to New York in 1962; Eleanor Fazan’s pay was doubled to £20 per week.

Eleanor Fazan’s work ethic took a toll on her personal life. In 1962, when Myers persuaded her to bring their son on a holiday in France, she had no sooner arrived than Albery telephoned asking her to return at once to sort out some difficulty with the musical Blitz!, which she had co-directed with Lionel Bart, and she agreed.

She was one of the first people in London to befriend and recognise the talent of Barry Humphries, who had a minor part in Oliver!. In 1969, she directed his one-man show, Just a Show, at the Fortune Theatre. Once, she arrived home from a rehearsal to find Humphries, still in a pink frock and high heels, drinking with Nigel Davenport, who observed: “It’s not all easy living with you, Fazan!” She watched Humphries’s rise to fame as Dame Edna with pride and amusement.

Barry Humphries as Fagin in Oliver! on London’s West End.Credit: Michael Le Poer Trench

Her relationship with Davenport ended when she put Nicolas and Luisa in a seaside hotel and left for Rotterdam to direct a touring version of Oliver!

In 1970, she directed Oskar Panizza’s orgiastic 1895 play The Council of Love, depicting God and the Vatican, a work which, according to one critic, made Oh! Calcutta! seem sophisticated. Prosecuted for blasphemy under ancient laws that threatened her with being burnt at the stake as a witch, she was defended pro bono by John Mortimer, QC (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey). Her tormentor was rebuked by the magistrate for wasting the court’s time.

In 1974, she made her operatic choreographical debut with Götz Friedrich’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and in subsequent years was sought out by leading directors, including Australian opera director Elijah Moshinsky, John Copley and John Schlesinger to choreograph operatic productions. Meanwhile, she continued to choreograph – and sometimes make minor stage appearances – in plays, musicals, and on screen.

Eleanor Fazan’s first credit was in 1949 as a dancer, and her last was as a choreographer in the 2012 award-winning television series Metropolitan Opera Live. In 2017, she was appointed OBE for services to dance.

English actress Susannah York watching Eleanor Fazan during a break in filming at Victoria Coach Station, London, 1965.Credit: Getty

Pantomime had been a feature in her early portfolio, and it was as director of Aladdin at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1960 that she suffered an unpleasant #MeToo incident with the elderly music hall star George Formby, who regularly tried to get her on her own. In one incident, he held her forcibly against the wall of his dressing room; luckily, he was interrupted.

“Even at the age of 30, I still thought it best to shut up,” she recalled. Sixty years later, asked whether she had let Formby and others “get away with it”, she wrote: “Well, I liked them, all those poets and rebels who flourish so well in our profession – I really liked them.”

Fazan and Una Stubbs (1937-2021) laugh while cooking in 1958.Credit: Getty

She attributed her consistent success in a male-dominated profession to her understanding of masculine psychology: “When it comes to men, dear,” she advised a young friend, “you mustn’t let them think that you can even drive a car.”

Lockdown was lonely: she had always been shortsighted; macular degeneration set in, and she started to lose her hearing. Stanley Myers died in 1993 and their son Nicolas in 2017.

Yet she continued to dress glamorously and many admirers, including young ballerinas who knew of her reputation, would call in when passing her elegant flat near Victoria Station. Her twin granddaughters, Anna and Eleanor, and their mother Emma Duncan, the journalist, were a great consolation to her.

The Telegraph, London