FORMER ballerina Grace Greenway, who ran a ballet school in Bournemouth and starred as the principal dancer in a film, has died aged 94.

Named Margaret Grace but known as Grace, she was born in a village in the Wye Valley in 1924.

In 1928 she was adopted by distant family and moved to Erith in south east London.

She excelled at sciences but dance, music, and the arts became her focus.

By the time she was 16 she had joined Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now The Royal Ballet company) and was dancing at Covent Garden with the likes of Margot Fonteyn, Beryl Grey, and Pamela May from 1940 through to 1944.

She trained first with Dorothy Greenhill, and then with Ninette de Valois at the school.

The journeys home to Erith, dodging the bombs during The Blitz, shaped her ability to face any potential disaster with complete calm.

She also toured the entire country with the company.

She was not a classical ballerina because she was very small and so specialised in character parts.

In 1944 she transferred to Sadler’s Wells Opera company where she met her future husband, Roy Taylor, who was a pianist and conductor with the company.

He lived in Parkstone and after they married in 1946 they lived in Westbourne.

They formed The Roy Taylor Opera Company, which was semi-professional, and it toured theatres and halls throughout the south of the country, from 1946 until 1951.

Roy died in late 1951 and Grace, a young widow, needed to establish a regular income both for herself and her four-year-old son, David,

Her financial issues were resolved when she became an assistant teacher at The Murilova Ballet School, which was then based at the Square in central Bournemouth.

This was where her career blossomed.

Not only did she have a natural rapport with her pupils (many of whom kept in touch with her until her death), but she developed her choreographic talents at the school, so much so that her dances frequently won national competitions.

On a website entitled The Dancing Career of Nalda Murilova, Grace is described as having made “a huge contribution to the school, both in her teaching proficiency and in her tactful, encouraging manner”.

Nalda Murilova, who established the school in the 1940s, passed the school to Grace when she retired, and Grace was principal of the school for 20 years.

During this time the school regularly gave performances at the Winter Gardens, which was then home to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and had an audience capacity of 1,000. The shows were always sold out.

The school, which is now based at St Michael’s Middle School in Wimborne, was also one of the driving forces behind the Bournemouth Ballet Club.

The club also gave performances at Bournemouth’s various theatres. In the early 1950s the club hired the Theatre Royal for a week to perform The Choice, a full length ballet.

Grace (pictured on the right, above) was the principal dancer. It was very successful and was subsequently made into a film in which Grace starred.

The ballet club became a very time consuming part of Grace’s life and, reportedly, was the oldest ballet club in Europe, possibly the world.

The club sadly closed in 2010 as the committee decided there were no longer enough members to continue.

Eventually the years caught up with Grace, and she retired and passed the Murilova school to Sandra McCauliffe (a former pupil).

She, in turn, has recently retired and has passed the school on to one of her former pupils.

The Murilova School has now been in existence for over 60 years.

Grace followed the progress of the school with great interest and was the guest of honour at the annual prize giving events.

Her final years were spent quietly at her home in Tennyson Road doting on various cats, a ‘famous’ tortoise and her beloved grandchildren.

Dementia finally set in and she spent the last 18 months of her life at The Avon Cliff nursing home where she was very happy.

She died on June 29 and is survived by her son, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The cremation will take place on Friday, July 13, at 1.45pm.