I often wondered whether her passion for literature music and the visual arts which she largely developed after her ballet career ended - and

I often wondered whether her passion for literature, music and the visual arts, which she largely developed after her ballet career ended - and which had a big influence on me - wasn't in some way making up for lost time and her lack of higher education.At home, she listened to classical music all day long and at one point trained with the BBC to become a Radio 3 announcer. She would have been blissful living in a farmhouse in the Proven? sun but had to make do with holidays in the Highlands instead. When I was a child our two families would combine to rent a remote house in Inverness-shire belonging to the historian John Grigg, where Ludovic could indulge his love of fishing and shooting and teach these sports to his children and nephews.It wasn't exactly Moira's cup of tea, but she entered into it with enthusiasm and her customary good-humour and sense of the absurd. She never completely shed her dancer's training; whether acting or in ordinary life she always stood and moved like a ballerina, even on the tennis court.Moira was an imaginative and generous godparent, remembering my birthday long after custom dictated For my 21st she gave me a complete set of Proust She loved French culture. I watched The Red Shoes on television and last year I saw Peeping Tom for the first time in the Michael Powell retrospective at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Moira told me she did not really care for Powell, though it is an extraordinary film, way ahead of its time. I also witnessed her stage comeback in Edinburgh in the late 1970s, when she and Ludovic were living in a Georgian terraced house overlooking the Water of Leith, and was moved by her performance in The Aspern Papers in Glasgow 12 years ago.When playing Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera in the Fifties, she said she dreaded every night having to mix and swallow in full view of the audience a "prairie oyster" - a concoction of raw egg and Worcester sauce - with which Sally tries to cure her hangover.

But I was brought up on stories of her grace and intelligence as a dancer, as well as of her beauty and mesmerising stage presence. She was a regular book reviewer for The Daily and The Sunday Telegraph, and wrote perceptive entries on Ashton and Helpmann for the DNB.In 2000, Shearer fell ill with viral encephalitis, which left her with an impaired memory. She and her husband had left Scotland to live in Avebury, Wiltshire, but in 2002 they sold their house to move to Oxford.Nadine MeisnerMoira Shearer was made my godmother in 1951, having married my uncle Ludovic Kennedy, writes Richard Calvocoressi.I am not a ballet historian and I am too young ever to have seen her dance, so short was her career. She wrote a biography, Ellen Terry (1998), as well as her book about Balanchine.

She was a reader on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, she lectured widely on Diaghilev and the history of the ballet, she gave public recitals of poetry and prose with her husband. She toured for another six months as Sally Bowles (replacing Dorothy Tutin) in Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera. She joined the Bristol Old Vic, where she appeared in Shaw's Major Barbara (1956) and other plays.After a gap, she resumed stage acting, playing Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1977) and Judith Bliss in Hay Fever (1978) at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. She served on the Scottish Arts Council (1971-73) and the BBC General Advisory Council (1970-77), and was a director of Border Television (1977-82). Still later, she was Juliana Bordereau in The Aspern Papers at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (1994).She had meanwhile reinvented herself as a lecturer, writer and broadcaster.

She made several other films: The Story of Three Loves (1952); The Man Who Loved Redheads (1954); Peeping Tom (1960); and Black Tights (1961). On stage she played Titania (opposite Robert Helpmann's Oberon) in an Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the 1954 Edinburgh Festival, which then toured Canada and the United States. Kennedy, who had been so overwhelmed by The Red Shoes, recognised her and plucked up the courage to invite her to dance. She had accepted, but added, to his astonishment, "I don't dance very well." She then showed him she wasn't exaggerating. She trod on his feet and nearly tripped him up, explaining that she rarely attempted ballroom dancing.Shearer's retirement from dancing was provoked by injury and an ambition to become an actress. His confidence in her was a tremendous boost, at a time when she imagined herself accepted in the company only because of her looks and renown.