È morta all'età di 80 anni la ballerina e attrice scozzese Moira Shearer, interprete del film " Scarpette rosse" ( 1948), il più celebre film sul balletto mai fatto. Il decesso è avvenuto al John Radcliffe Hospital di Oxford. Stella del balletto classico britannico, Shearer era entrata nel Royal Ballet di Londra nel 1942, a 16 anni.

The red shoes (1948)
Directed by
Michael Powell
Emeric Pressburger

Writing credits
Hans Christian Andersen (fairy tale)
Michael Powell ...

Dance she did, and dance she must - between her two loves

Trivia for
The Red Shoes (1948)


The exterior of The Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate was shown in the rain because Michael Powell had often gone there to see plays or the ballet and he reminisced "it always seemed to be raining when one queued up for Madame Rambert's productions".


The 15 min (approx) Ballet of the Red Shoes used a corps de ballet of 53 dancers.


Jack Cardiff deliberately manipulated camera speed during the Red Shoes ballet to create the effect of dancers almost hovering in mid air at the peak of their jumps.


This went massively over-budget and the Rank Company (who financed it and were to release it) had little faith in its commercial potential. They tried to bury it by not giving it a premiere (backer J. Arthur Rank walked out of its first performance) and by just letting it quietly show at late screenings at a cinema in London. They weren't even prepared to strike a print for the American market. Slowly, however, audiences started to pick up on the film and Rank realized that they might have a potential break-out hit after all. Indeed, when an initial print was made for the States, it played at an off-Broadway theater for an unprecedented 110 weeks. That was enough to convince Universal to take up the distribution rights for the US, which they did in 1951.


When people complained to Michael Powell about the grim ending, he pointed out to them that in Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tale, the ballerina had her feet hacked off by a woodsman to stop her dancing.


Emeric Pressburger originally wrote the script in 1937 when producer Alexander Korda was casting around for a project for his wife, Merle Oberon. The intention was that a professional dancer would fill in for Oberon in the dancing scenes. Nothing ever came of it - mainly due to the intervention of the war - and Powell and Pressburger were able to buy the rights for the screenplay back from Korda for £12,000 in 1947. To do this, however, they had to pretend that it was purely for sentimental reasons and not because they wanted to make it into a film. Having worked for Korda before, they both knew that he was a very shrewd businessman and that, if he detected that they really wanted the property, he would have driven the price up.


Much to his surprise, Michael Powell had great difficulty persuading Moira Shearer to be in the film. She held out for a year before giving in to him. Shearer herself, however, did not particularly care for Powell. In later years, she described the making of the film as being a terrible ordeal: Powell was distant and aloof and never really gave her much direction; and having to dance for hours on end on concrete floors also physically took its toll on all the dancers, making their legs swell up.

Cinematographer Jack Cardiff wasn't keen on doing a ballet film so he forced himself to take in as many ballet productions as he could to familiarize himself with this art form. He was soon won over.


Art director Hein Heckroth was a painter who had never worked on a film before. He created a 15 minute "animatic" (filmed storyboard) reel to convey the type of mood and feel his sets would give which acted as an ideal guide for cinematographer Jack Cardiff.


Brian Easdale's Oscar-winning score was performed for the film by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.


Made two years after the end of the Second World War, Michael Powell said: "For ten years we had been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, "The Red Shoes" told us to go out and die for art".


Casting the role of Vicky Page was a tough call for Powell and Pressburger. Ideally they wanted a ballerina who could act and who also had to be ravishingly beautiful. They were thrilled when they discovered Moira Shearer who was second to Margot Fonteyn at the famous Sadler's Wells Ballet, but she initially rebuffed them. In the year it took to persuade her to come round, the directors were forced to consider casting actresses like Ann Todd and Hazel Court, and cheating with a real ballerina in the ballet sequences.


On her first day of shooting Moira Shearer got badly sun burnt and developed a blister on her back. Later in the production, she also wrenched her neck quite badly when called to leap from a window, and she also received a scratch which turned into an abscess. Shearer would often find herself being suspended in a harness for up to 8 hours, whilst being buffeted by wind machines.

The title ballet sequence took 6 weeks to shoot and employed over 120 paintings by Hein Heckroth. The dancing newspaper was achieved through careful cutting and use of wires.

Allan Gray was dismissed as the film's composer to be replaced by Brian Easdale - a former documentary filmmaker - who won an Oscar for his work on the film.


Anton Walbrook's character of Lermontov was generally thought to be based on the real ballet impresario Diaghelev, the man behind Nijinsky. Powell and Pressburger, however, were more inclined to say that he was a representation of their first main mentor, Alexander Korda.


This film is 9th in the "BFI 100", a list of a hundred of 'the best British films ever' compiled by the British Film Institute in 1999/2000.


Technicolor founders 'Herbert Kalmus' and Natalie Kalmus considered this film the best example of Three-Strip Technicolor.