Theatre

Surviving polio and persecution, Russian woman Tanya Pearson arrived in Australia in 1950 hoping for a new life. More than sixty years later she’s handing the Sydney City Youth Ballet reins over to the next generation. Rosemary Desmond reports.

Felicity Kendal made her stage debut while on a tour of India at the tender age of nine months as a changeling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Her actor/manager father changed his surname from Bragg to Kendal - after his Cumbrian birthplace - and the family moved from Birmingham to post-colonial India when Felicity was seven.

She’s been the toast of Broadway, worked with Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor and remembers the New York City of 1940 as “almost intimate”.

Angela Lansbury has also won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes and starred in one of the longest-running crime drama series on US television.

There’s not much she hasn’t seen or done in her 70 years in film, stage and television.