Marilyn Rowe

Marilyn Rowe AM OBE (b. 1946), former prima ballerina, was the first graduate of The Australian Ballet School to become its director. Born in Sydney, Rowe was one of 23 students in the first intake of The Australian Ballet School in 1964. At that time, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were guesting with The Australian Ballet, which had formed in 1962. Dame Peggy van Praagh invited Rowe to join the company at the end of 1964 and she was promoted to principal artist in 1969. Four years later, she and Kelvin Coe won silver medals at the Second International Ballet Competition in Moscow. Rowe danced all of the major roles in The Australian Ballet's repertoire and had several works created for her by leading international choreographers, including Gemini (Glen Tetley), The Merry Widow (Ronald Hynd) and Anna Karenina (André Prokovsky). She and Coe performed in New York and London, and became the first Australians to be invited to dance with the Bolshoi, Riga and Vilnius ballet companies. At the end of 1980, while pregnant, Rowe's husband Christopher Maver died in a plane crash. She went into seclusion, but when her son was six months old, in response to demands from the dancers, she returned to the company as an adviser to the artistic director. In 1982 and 1985 she received the Green Room Award for Best Female Dancer. Director of the Dancers' Company from 1984 to 1986, she was on the board of The Australian Ballet from 1994 to 2009, and was Director of The Australian Ballet School from 1999 to 2014. Rowe has produced and directed major contemporary and classical works and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Australian Dance Awards in 2015.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2017
© Robert McFarlane/Copyright Agency, 2023