Since the 1970s, British musical theatre has boasted a professionalism and audacity once thought exclusive to Broadway. Much of the credit, entrepreneurial and creative, has gone to Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, but an equally vital force was the choreographer, director and dancer Gillian Lynne, who has died aged 92. She pioneered a striking fusion of ballet, jazz and vaudeville dance, most famously in Cats (1981).

Derived from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, this Lloyd Webber-Trevor Nunn confection became the longest running musical in both London and New York, though its record has now been surpassed. Lynne staged more than a dozen productions of Cats around the world, and was most recently involved in the West End revival of 2014 (though she professed her dismay when the show’s choreography was updated for the 2016 Broadway revival). In 1986, she began a similarly prolific global trip with Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gillian Lynne performing in Ballet Imperial by George Balanchine in 1950. Photograph: Baron/Getty Images

Lynne reinvented choreography in Britain, much as Bob Fosse did in the US, but her career was infinitely more varied than his. She made her breakthrough as a choreographer with Collages (1963) at the Edinburgh festival. She conceived, directed and starred in this innovative amalgam of jazz and classical styles, with a score by Dudley Moore. Collages was admired by David Merrick, then Broadway’s most powerful impresario, who took her to New York to stage the numbers for The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd (1965).

In the West End, she directed and choreographed The Matchgirls (1966). She staged the musical numbers for Hans Christian Andersen (1974), with Tommy Steele at the London Palladium, and the Olivier award-winning Songbook (1979). She returned to the Palladium in 2002 to choreograph the theatrical version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and took the same show to Broadway three years later.

With the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lynne was for a while the unofficial house choreographer. She staged musical numbers for The Comedy of Errors (1976), As You Like It (1977), The Way of the World (1978), Once In a Lifetime (1979) and The Secret Garden (2000). She co-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1977) and contributed “additional direction” to La Ronde (1982). A crossover artist before the term was invented, she worked with ballet and opera companies around the world, choreographing Faust at the Met (1990) and Parsifal at Covent Garden (1979).

She won a Bafta for her direction and choreography of A Simple Man (1987), commissioned by BBC TV for the centenary of LS Lowry’s birth. In 1988, she created a stage version for Northern Ballet, which was revived in 2009. Her other ballets included Journey for the Bolshoi in 1998. In 2014 she presented a new version of Robert Helpmann’s Miracle in the Gorbals for Birmingham Royal Ballet – she had been in the cast when it was premiered in London 70 years earlier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cats, 1981, was based on TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex/Shutterstock

Among her many awards, a special category – outstanding achievement in a musical – was created in 1981 by the organisers of the Oliviers to recognise her contribution to the blockbusting Cats. Uninhibited by a flimsy narrative, Lynne had transformed a motley cast into an ensemble of athletic, sensual and quirky felines. She pushed show dancers beyond previous limits, always leading rehearsals on the stage floor, never from the comfort of the stalls.

What drove her was the dancer’s all-consuming discipline, not the ambition of her male directorial counterparts. Interviewed in the Times in 2014, shortly after the release of her exercise DVD Longevity Through Exercise, she said: “Of course I have done pretty well. The royalties from Cats and Phantom come in week in and week out. I could have retired on my royalties, but I didn’t want to stop working.”

An only child, Gillian was born in Bromley, Kent, the daughter of Barbara (nee Hart) and Major Leslie Pyrke – she later took Lynne as a stage name. Her passion for dance was inspired by her mother, who took her to classes where Beryl Grey was a fellow pupil. While her father was away with the Royal West Kents, her mother was killed in a car crash, when Gillian was 13. Missing her mother, and her dance classes, she ran away from home, and was found only after three days, in a farmhouse in Somerset.

Her father had read in Picture Post about the Cone Ripman school, later renamed the Arts Educational, and suggested she go there to learn to dance and act. She auditioned, and won a scholarship. By the age of 16, Lynne was dancing the Swan Queen at the People’s Palace in Mile End. She was spotted by Ninette de Valois, who took her to Sadler’s Wells alongside Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer. Between 1946 and 1951, Lynne was a principal at the Royal Ballet, where her mentors included Frederick Ashton and Helpmann. During holidays, she took herself off to the US and France, seeking out the best and most innovative teachers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in The Phantom of the Opera, 1986. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex Features

Heartbroken to be passed over for a role at the Royal Ballet, she was recommended to the management of the London Palladium by Helpmann. Lynne made what proved a decisive leap to the Palladium, the nation’s hub of variety, where dance sequences were specially created for her.

Always a fanatical self-improver, she found herself a voice coach. She was seen by a film casting director who had been struggling to fill the role of Marianne opposite Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae (1952). Lynne got the part, and took her first steps toward choreography when asked to add dances for herself to the movie.“I had a fling with Errol,” she said, “but so did everyone.”

For the rest of the 50s, Lynne played leading roles in pantomime and stage musicals, including Claudine in Can Can at the London Coliseum (1954-55), and she appeared in various guises on TV. In 1959, she narrated Peter and the Wolf live on BBC TV with the Royal Philharmonic, and mimed all the roles. The following year, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, she led the company of the revue New Cranks.

Her debut as a choreographer of ballet came with The Owl and the Pussycat for the Western Theatre Ballet in 1961. This was the first of the three collaborations with Moore that led her eventually to Broadway. But by the time she arrived there, she had already staged the musical numbers for three films, including Wonderful Life (1964) with Cliff Richard. Later movies were to include Half a Sixpence (1967), Man of La Mancha (1972) and Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983). Throughout, she continued to direct and choreograph revues and ballet for television. As one of two choreographers for The Muppet Show between 1976 and 1980, she helped win multiple Emmys and Baftas, and a Golden Rose of Montreux (1977).

In the theatre, her choreography sometimes flattered the material in hand, but could not always salvage it. Notable failures were Phil the Fluter (1969), about the songwriter Percy French, and Ambassador (1971), a florid adaptation of Henry James. More durable, if variably so, were Pickwick (1965, revived 1993), How Now Dow Jones (1967), The Card (1973), Tomfoolery (1980) and British revivals of My Fair Lady (1978) and Cabaret (1986).

Lynne’s career was marked by a knack of finding the right associates at the right time. When Nunn as head of the RSC began to flex his muscles as a director of musical theatre, a significant alliance was born with the acclaimed production of The Comedy of Errors. It was Nunn who subsequently invited her to choreograph Cats, which made them both millionaires. In subsequent collaborations with Lloyd Webber, she choreographed not only The Phantom of the Opera, but also his Aspects of Love (1990).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gillian Lynne managed to produce fine performances from the cast of Cats

Though radical and innovative in her professional life, Lynne was a ballerina of the old school in private: uncomplaining and impeccably mannered. She maintained the fitness regime and figure of the dancer she started out as, despite a fall into the orchestra pit while rehearsing The Phantom of the Opera in New York, the onset of arthritis, and double hip replacement surgery.

She claimed her move into choreography and directing was pure serendipity, and that all she ever wanted to be was “the best performer”. In 1997, she was appointed CBE for services to dance and in 2014 she was made a dame. She published a memoir, A Dancer in Wartime, in 2011. In a ceremony last month, Lloyd Webber renamed the New London theatre - where Cats was first staged - in Lynne’s honour; she was carried to the stage in a golden throne surrounded by dancers.

While a principal with Sadler’s Wells, she married the barrister Patrick Back. After their divorce, she went out of her way to insist that they remained friends. Her second husband, the actor Peter Land, whom she married in 1980, survives her.

• Gillian Lynne (Gillian Barbara Pyrke), choreographer, director and dancer, born 20 February 1926; died 1 July 2018