Can they can-can? As maîtresse de ballet of the Moulin Rouge in Paris, Janet Pharaoh’s role was to find out. The Yorkshire-born former dancer scoured the world in search of recruits for the club’s shows. “People say all the time, ‘You should look at this girl’ or ‘You should really have this girl in your team’, but I won’t take on anyone until I have seen them for myself,” she told the Yorkshire Post. While height, beauty and ability mattered, personality was just as important. “I am looking for what I call sparkle. It’s star quality but also the ability to fit in,” she said.
The Moulin Rouge (or red windmill) opened in 1889 and in 1898 a guide to the city’s nightlife described its dancers as “an army of young girls in Paris who dance this divine hullabaloo the way its fame demands it … with such an elasticity when they launch their legs upwards that we are allowed to presume that they are at least as flexible with morals”. It reached the big screen in Baz Luhrmann’s colourful musical Moulin Rouge! (2001), starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, which was adapted for the West End stage in 2022.
Pharaoh, who was tall and slender with a booming voice and an accent as broad as the day she left Leeds, was not only responsible for finding new talent but also for ensuring that everything ran smoothly during performances. That was some feat given that at any one time there were up to 40 dancers on the stage, more than 1,000 costumes and occasional appearances from a live boa constrictor or a horse.
The Moulin Rouge may be quintessentially French, but stroll backstage and a visitor could be forgiven for thinking they had landed in an anglophone world, with dancers from Australia, Canada and Britain. “There just aren’t enough good French dancers,” Pharaoh told The Sunday Times, blaming the long hours of the French school system. “Once they are here, they are all Moulin nationality,” she added.
It was hard work for her dancers, who were drilled in everything from their steps to costume management. She taught them to whip off their silver-sequinned trousers while dancing and to “pop” the red-feathered folds of their costumes, nicknamed “tomatoes”. Learning the can-can itself was the most gruelling. “It’s fiendishly horrible,” she said. “It’s the complete opposite of ballet. It comes from a kind of street dance; you can’t just throw yourself into it or you would injure yourself. You have to kick the leg up high, with music that’s very fast. It’s all about speed and stamina.”
While critics sometimes derided the Moulin Rouge as outdated, Pharaoh was quick to defend her scantily clad performers. “We do two shows a day and both play to packed audiences, so we must be giving people what they want,” she said. “It is pure escapism. We are offering them fun without any agenda and I make no apology for that.”
Janet Pharaoh was born in Rothwell, near Leeds, in 1959, the second of three daughters of Roy Pharaoh, who ferried his girls to dance classes, and his wife Catherine (née Latham), who made their costumes. Weekends were spent taking part in dance competitions in resorts such as Skegness and Filey. At the age of five she joined a local dance class, though she never attended a specialist dance school. Her education was at Rothwell Grammar School. “I’d get the bus to the Mullen Dance Academy in Leeds after school and then back home to do my homework,” she said.
Although a good dancer, ballet was not her destiny. “I was too tall. I would have loved to have gone into musical theatre, but those roles tended to go to the smaller girls,” she said. Her mother, “always my biggest supporter”, suggested she apply to the Bluebell dancers, who were known for being tall. She passed her audition and four days after finishing her A-levels left Yorkshire for Paris, where she was sent to dance at Le Lido on the Champs-Élysées, then to La Scala in Barcelona.
In 1980 Pharaoh was approached by Doris Haug, “Miss Doris”, who had created the Moulin Rouge’s famous troupe in the 1950s. “She gave me a phone call and offered me a job at 19. I got on the night train to Paris and went to the Moulin Rouge. I had a reputation in the dance world and thought it was great. The job was in Monte Carlo so I went straight there,” she said.
Two years later she requested a transfer to Paris, where she became dance captain. She succeeded Miss Doris in 1997 and became artistic director in 2009, taking her dancers to the Rio Carnival in Brazil, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and the foot of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, she scoured the world for new talent of both sexes, holding auditions in venues from Las Vegas to London and from Sydney to Paris. Even those who were not selected received constructive feedback. She is survived by Jean-Jacques Clerico, the chief executive of Moulin Rouge and her partner of almost 30 years, and by their son Jason, who lives and works in London.
Amid a gradual gentrification of the Pigalle district, the Moulin Rouge has increasingly marketed itself as fun for all the family, even offering discounts for children. “It’s not an erotic show,” Pharaoh insisted. “It’s pretty difficult being erotic with 70 people on stage; it’s no more revealing than some of the haute couture shows you see these days.” Indeed, despite the club’s risqué reputation, many of her dancers were so modest that they would not even go topless on holiday, though she explained how this had its pitfalls: “They end up with bikini marks, and that will not do.”
Janet Pharaoh, artistic director of the Moulin Rouge in Paris, was born on May 16, 1959. She died after a short illness on March 4, 2025, aged 65