Astrid's Life

I met Frances at one of Astrid’s dinners in 1971, and I am most grateful that she has contacted me again and added another insight into Astrid’s life and times. PCA

Remembering Astrid Zydower

by Frances Kelly

Like many Australians, an important rite of passage for me as a writer - and as an individual - was to leave our insular home and head for London. As a journalist and writer on the arts, particularly ballet, the aim of this trip was to broaden my horizons enormously - I could never have dreamt how much.

Through good fortune and incredible cheek in 1971 I came to know Sunday Times ballet critic, author, exhibition designer Richard Buckle, who at that time was attempting to save Lord Harewood’s Titian, the Death of Actaeon, from being sold to America. To raise funds he was organising a gala, to be called The Greatest Show on Earth. For some reason he took me under his wing.

This involved going with him to the ballet a lot and meeting many incredible people.

One particular night we went to the premiere of a ballet choreographed by Norman Morrice for Ballet Rambert. Dickie had a spare ticket because actress Vanessa Redgrave couldn’t go with him. She was filming somewhere. He must have had two spare tickets because Astrid Zydower came too.

We met company founder Dame Marie Rambert afterwards, a lively 84 year old, being driven off in someone’s sports-car waving her umbrella through the roof at us in delight.

Astrid was also a friend of Dame Marie’s having sculpted a portrait of her, called Quicksilver, commissioned by Dickie and accepted by the National Portrait Gallery. Quicksilver, Dame Marie’s nickname as a child, also became the title of her autobiography, published in 1972, including an illustration of the bust, partly funded by Lincoln Kirstein. Astrid and I became firm friends.

I knew none of Astrid’s background, only learning some of it from her obituary recently - she was just Ast, to me. She didn’t talk about herself at all that I can remember.

Going to her house in Kentish Town was a feast for the eye: there were maquettes in the garden - one for a statue of Winston Churchill in the zipped coveralls he wore in the underground bunker during WWII. It was commissioned by the Sultan of Brunei (later going to a museum thence to disappear) [But see my notes on this piece - PCA].

In Astrid’s studio - the high ceilinged front rooms of her house - there were huge plaster elephants and she was working on a full length figure of a ballerina. Around the house, its walls painted a warm tan, were displayed the quirky objects that artists collect, including a big pair of articulated wooden lips made by a student, her busts for the World Fair, paintings of course.

I took lots of pictures - as I did in those days, recording so many new sights and experiences.

Dickie was amused by our instant friendship and wanted Astrid and I to appear in the gala as the heavenly twins because of our similar heights - she was an inch and a quarter taller than me. But Astrid was too nervous. I was slightly disappointed. Would have been really something to have appeared on the same bill as Dame Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer!

That first extraordinary night of meeting, after seeing the Dame Marie Rambert off, Astrid, Dickie and I walked back to his flat in Covent Garden in heavy rain. Astrid’s trousers shrank while mine unaccountably stretched, which made climbing the stairs to the first floor above the bank rather difficult (Ast and I used to fantasize about robbing this bank - a daft idea I used years later for a play).

Dickie stripped off his wet clothes and appeared in a giant red towel, worn as a toga. Deciding he had two women in the house, he ordered eggs and bacon. I was hopeless with eggs and Astrid at 40 had never fried one in her life. On seeing our burnt offerings Dickie produced his own plus chicken liver pate, while making extremely rude remarks about ‘useless women’.

Astrid invited me for dinner and I visited her often after that - rushing over one day after there had been a murder in her street the previous night. She was naturally concerned.

For some reason, she decided to draw me - we had about six sittings without me taking the liberty of seeing how she was going. However when I set about photographing her at work, I peeped and realised she’d drawn only one eye!
By this time I’d been in London more than three years and starting to overstay my welcome with the authorities. There had also been a series of strikes, there was little heating and no hot water - it was extremely cold. I was offered a job in Sydney and decided to go home.

What about the portrait, exclaimed Ast. I was diplomatic about the length of time it might take to complete, if just one eye had come out of six sittings!

Sadly I never saw her again, but in writing a memoir I checked something about Astrid online and found that at 75, she had died in 2005. Her obituary in the Independent, was a revelation.

The checking process also led me to ‘meet’ photographer Peter Amsden, who revealed in a series of fascinating emails from one end of the earth (Scotland) to the other (Hastings in southern Australia) that he felt he was like a brother to Ast. They met when she was teaching art at Hornsey College of Art and he was teaching photography. He is now attempting to trace her work and establish this website in her memory.

I gained an enormous amount from knowing Astrid and in looking back, realise how darn lucky I was to spend time with such a noted sculptor in her prime. Thanks Ast - and Dickie - where-ever you are. And thanks to Peter for helping to expand those lovely memories.

Frances Kelly is a journalist, poet and author of 11 books on gardening and related subjects. Her work has been included in four anthologies. She has semi-retired to write fiction, though has been ‘bushwacked’ by the need to write a memoir thanks to a sheaf of her London letters coming to light. Fran is a weekend painter and creator of off beat collage/embroideries for a local gallery.