The first was the auburn-haired Moira Shearer, who died in 2006. In 1948, at the zenith of her career with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, she was cast as the heroine of Powell and Pressburger’s smash-hit movie The Red Shoes – a film of lavish Mediterranean glamour and romance which captivated a generation otherwise sunk in post-war austerity and created an aura around ballet which inspired untold thousands of little girls to sign up for ballet classes and dream the dream. Shearer was not a one-hit wonder: she went on to appear in several other major films and theatrical productions, often with some Terpsichorean connotation (Black Tights, A Midsummer Night’s Dream), as well as marrying the author and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, with whom she had four children. Older readers of the Daily Telegraph will also remember a further and more surprising string to her bow, when later in life she became an astute and accomplished book reviewer.