Zizi Jeanmaire, gamine dancer and singer who seduced France with her flamboyance and wit – obituary

Zizi Jeanmaire, the dancer and cabaret artist, who has died aged 96, was one of Paris’s most celebrated entertainers – an extraordinary, gamine ballet dancer who crossed over into the boîtes de nuit to become a legendarily witty and seductive singing performer.

Married to the chic ballet choreographer Roland Petit, Zizi Jeanmaire was sought after by the greatest male dancers, such as Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, both of whom were filmed dancing with her in Petit’s ballets. Her popular status was sealed by Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 hit pop single, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), which cited Zizi Jeanmaire as the ultimate dancer.

The diminutive Zizi, with her short black bob, and the tall, rakish Petit, were Paris’s defining culture couple in the 1950s and 1960s, attracting cultural figures from all corners of the arts and letters. Petit was felt to have reinvented ballet in a distinctly fresh, Parisian way and Zizi Jeanmaire’s boy-girl sexiness and sharp wit became an inspiration to cutting-edge designers and songwriters. Without her, said the leading French poet and publisher Louis Aragon, “Paris would not be Paris.”

Yves Saint Laurent, her close friend, frequently designed costumes, frothing with feathers and sequins, for Zizi Jeanmaire’s extravagant shows. Meanwhile, her husband ensured that her devastating legs were deployed to memorable effect every bit as naughty as her songwriters’ lyrics. Mon Truc en Plumes, which roughly translates as “My Thingumajig in Feathers”, became her calling card both musically and visually, with its peekaboo effects among gigantic pink plumes.

Born on April 29 1924 in Paris, Renée Marcelle Jeanmaire was the only child of Swiss parents, and began as petit rat in the Paris Opera Ballet School at nine, alongside Petit. It was the start of a 78-year relationship, professional and private, that ended only on his death in 2011.

She joined the august ballet company on the eve of war, when she was only 15, taken under the wing of the brilliant young ballerina Yvette Chauviré. But the younger dancer recognised that she would never be the classical sylph epitomised by Chauviré, and she and Petit quit the Paris Opera Ballet in 1944 when both were just 20.

Zizi Jeanmaire joined the Ballets Russes follow-up companies of Colonel de Basil, while Petit set up his own company, Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées, which rapidly became the most talked-about company in Western Europe: modern, sexy and up to date, and starring the remarkable and unorthodox dancers, Renée Jeanmaire and Jean Babilée.

One of those talking about Petit was London’s leading ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, with whom he had a significant affair while also retaining Zizi Jeanmaire’s affections. She gave Petit an ultimatum: he must create a ballet for her or she would leave him. “I am not romantique – my temperament is bouillante, boiling hot,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 1998.

The result was Carmen, a devastatingly arousing modern ballet premiered at the Princess Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1949. At Petit’s request, Zizi Jeanmaire bobbed her hair short and wore a very brief black corset. The erotic directness of her pas de deux with Petit caused, it was said, visible excitement among males in the audience, and the leading British ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton commented sadly that his own neo-classical ballets would now be considered old-fashioned.

Carmen’s success took the company to sell-out tours in New York and America, and led to Hollywood invitations. In 1952 Petit choreographed (at Howard Hughes’s request) Hans Christian Andersen for Zizi Jeanmaire and Danny Kaye; but his affairs with Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor caused an inevitable rift with his leading lady.

Then, after two years’ separation, they reunited and married in 1954. Zizi Jeanmaire then featured in Anything Goes (alongside Bing Crosby) but to her chagrin was giving birth to a daughter, Valentine, when her husband was called to choreograph Daddy Long Legs for Fred Astaire in 1955. The female lead went to a young Zizi lookalike, Leslie Caron.

In 1956 Zizi was back in front of the cameras for the revue film Folies Bergères, and that year Petit made his first Paris stage revue for her. He had first had her sing in a ballet in 1950 in La Croqueuse de Diamants (The Gold Digger), in which her husky, suggestive voice had won her the Grand Prix du Disque award.

Now he developed her versatility to reveal a complete stage artist whose flamboyance, wit and suggestiveness would sell countless records, cost thousands of ostriches their feathers, and make Paris the headquarters of sophisticated nightlife.

Meanwhile she also continued to dance Petit’s dramatic ballets with an uncanny resistance to time that only deepened her allure. In 1966 she starred as the mysterious woman luring a young man to suicide in a film of Petit’s ballet Le jeune homme et la mort with Nureyev; in 1980 she was filmed with Baryshnikov in Petit’s Carmen for a television production that retains its potency today.

In 1970 Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire bought the Casino de Paris specifically to feature Zizi revue shows, and she continued as a world star into her seventies, becoming a leading champion of French songwriting, and issuing some 30 records over her career.

She appeared as the evil Fairy Carabosse in the Ballet de Marseille production (and film) of The Sleeping Beauty in 1990, and starred in Petit’s final stage spectacular for her in 2000 at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. “Maybe my ’usband did a bit of Pygmalion on me,” she said. “I was looking for that, we have the same taste.”

Unshakeably loyal to her husband’s ambitions, she was delighted that the Paris ballet establishment finally recognised its prodigal son by inviting Petit to direct the Paris Opéra Ballet in the 1970s – if only briefly – but remained frustrated by Britain’s failure to give him the same high regard. Petit’s death came a week before a rare showcase of his work performed by the English National Ballet at the London Coliseum.

Zizi Jeanmaire was appointed an Officier of the Légion d’honneur in 1993, and Commander of the Ordre National du Mérite (1997) among many awards.

Zizi Jeanmaire is survived by her daughter with Roland Petit, the songwriter Valentine Petit.

Zizi Jeanmaire, born April 29 1924, died July 17 2020