Vale: Eileen Kramer dies at 110

Legendary Australian dancer, choreographer, artist, actor and writer Eileen Kramer, has died aged 110.

She died peacefully at her home in Lulworth House in Sydney at 4.45pm on Friday, exactly a week after her 110th birthday, The Guardian reports.

The woman who once danced for the famed Bodenwieser Ballet was still dancing at the age of 100 in a piece choreographed for ABC’s Compass.

Aged 104 she acted in the Foxtel drama The End playing retiree Rita, alongside Noni Hazlehurst, Robyn Nevin, John Waters, Roy Billing, Val Lehman, Diana McLean, Hazel Phillips., Tony Barry, Robert Coleby, and Ian McFadyen.

Eileen Kramer was born in 1914 and studied singing at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She worked as an usherette and an artist’s model, at one time posing for Norman Lindsay, but made her career as a dancer, artist, performer, and choreographer. She toured Australia with the Bodenwieser Ballet -described as “the first truly influential modern dance company in Australia. At one point she was even taught to do The Twist by Louis Armstrong. In 2014, to mark turning 100, she crowdfunded, choreographed, and performed a dance piece called “The Early Ones” and in 2019 she became the oldest ever contributor to the Archibald Prize.

Travelling through India, making a living from dancing, she wound up in Paris where she learnt to dance the twist from Louis Armstrong and met her future husband, film maker Baruch Shadmi. They moved to New York in the late 1950s and spent the next five years making their own animated film. When Baruch suffered a stroke, Eileen put her dancing career aside and cared for him for eighteen years until his death in 1987.

In her seventies, Eileen re-discovered dance and romance when she moved to Lewisburg, West Virginia. She was set up with Bill, a widower in his eighties, and much to her surprise, they fell madly in love. Living with Bill gave her a new-found freedom and she began working with The Trillium Performing Arts Collective. At the age of eighty, Eileen re-invented herself once again, as a choreographer. Over the next twenty years she worked at full capacity, dancing, choreographing and making costumes for their major performances. Supported by her Trillium friends after Bill’s death, Eileen became nostalgic for the smell of gum leaves and the call of the kookaburras. So at 99, after living overseas for over half a century, she returned to Australia with no more than a couple of suitcases filled with clothes and costumes.

With slender means but a great capacity for connecting with young people Eileen charmed the staff and clientele of a Chippendale cafe where she met a musician who asked her to dance in a video clip for his first single. This led to a new cycle of creativity working with professional dancers to realise her latest crowd-funded dance piece.

In The End playing ‘Rita’ she was pressed on euthanasia by campaigner Edie (Harriet Walter) and her daughter Kate (Frances O’Connor). But her response was not exactly what they were expecting.

“You never know what the next day will bring do you?”