the times | Saturday December 18 2021 87
ble charm. “Payment was irregular and
there would be the delightful windfall
of many months’ pay after a period of
bleak penury,” noted one report.
They were based in Monte Carlo
among artists such as Pablo Picasso,
Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. “The
marquis encouraged collaboration
among leading contemporary artists
outside the field of dance, so the level of
creativity was intense,” Tallchief re-
called. He was also an eccentric. “Every
time we visited him in Paris, he spoke to
us from his bed with all of his pekinese
surrounding him,” she added.
Dancing at the Alhambra theatre in
Paris, Tallchief was a sensation. “I never
expected the audience to go completely
wild,” she recalled. “Obviously, I had
seen my share of standing ovations, but
they paled in the face of what we en-
countered in Paris.” The reviews
echoed the audience’s sentiments. “She
is a marvellous dark and slender crea- [email protected]
Protection of London Squares, for
which he was appointed MBE in 2010.
Fungi were, he said, “the most im-
portant element in ecology... without
them the whole world would collapse”.
His followers included the Prince of
Wales, who consulted him about the
mushrooms at Balmoral.
He is survived by his second wife,
Nicky Foy, a noted plantswoman who
collaborated on several of his books,
and their daughters, Lyla, a singer-
songwriter, and Phoebe Foy-Phillips, a
sales director, and by Sam, his son from
his first marriage to Pammy Wray,
which ended in divorce.
Roger Howard Phillips was born in
1932 in Uxbridge to Elsie (née Willi-
ams), a magistrate, and Philip Phillips,
the treasurer of Hillingdon council. He
attended St Christopher School, Letch-
worth, a progressive vegetarian institu-
tion where contemporaries included
the film director Michael Winner and
Prince Rupert Loewenstein, business
manager of the Rolling Stones.
His unconventional schooling made
him a non-conformist for life. Three
months into his National Service with
the RAF in Canada, he decided that he
“didn’t want to be trained to kill people”
and somehow persuaded an air vice-
marshal to let him return to London,
where he enrolled at the Chelsea
School of Art. It led to him becoming
art director at the Ogilvy & Mather
agency where he worked on the
Schweppes “Schhh... you know who”
ads and the Egg Marketing Board’s “Go
to work on an egg” campaign.
Working in advertising he discov-
ered his aptitude for photography.
“He’d hire photographers for ad cam-
paigns, didn’t like what they did and so
started taking the pictures himself,” his
daughter Lyla said.
He also photographed Eric Clapton
and Cream for the cover of their final
album Goodbye (1969). He became
close friends with the jazz-loving bassist
Jack Bruce, shooting covers for several
of his solo albums. At the time “magic
mushrooms” were all the rage in rock
circles but Phillips had little interest in
the hallucinogenic qualities of fungi,
claiming that he was on a natural high.
Having photographed every plant
native to Britain he turned his attention
to the rest of the planet and published
his final book, The Worldwide Forager,
in 2020. It included his search for the
desert truffle, which he was convinced
was the biblical manna from Heaven
that sustained the Is-
raelites in the book
of Exodus. “And we
went out and found
this thing,” he said.
“Didn’t taste
great, but it was
incredibly excit-
ing.”Roger Phillips, MBE,
mushroom man, was
born on December 16,- He died of undisclosed
causes on November 15, 2021,
aged 88
leading soloist, an undeniable promo-
tion that brought her to Europe. From
there she moved on to what became the
Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.
While visiting New York in 1946 she
met George Skibine, a Russian-Ameri-
can dancer, on the corner of 54th Street
and Broadway. Skibine, who at the age
of five had been an extra in Diaghilev’s
production of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka,
annoyed her by mistaking her for
Maria, whom he knew a little. Their
identities unscrambled, harmony pre-
vailed and while touring France in
August 1947 they were married at Saint
Sauveur Church, Vichy.
“Of all the partners I ever danced
with, Youra was the best,” Tallchief said.
“When he stopped dancing, I missed
him terribly because we worked to-
gether like one person. We moved so
well together and our timing was al-
ways perfect.” He died in 1981 and she is
survived by their twin sons, Alexander
and George, who are lawyers specialis-
ing in Native American law and policy.Tallchief danced for presidents John
F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson as
well as for President de Gaulle of
France, and in 1958 became the first
American ballerina since the Second
World War to dance at the Bolshoi
Theatre, Moscow. She returned to the
US in 1964 and was prima ballerina
with Harkness Ballet, New York, until
retiring from the stage in 1966. Later
she was dance director for Dallas Civic
Ballet, helped her sister to found Chi-
cago City Ballet and spent the early
1990s with the Harid Conservatory in
Boca Raton, Florida.
Tallchief was the last of the Five
Moons of Oklahoma, five Native
American ballerinas who achieved
international success. The others were
Myra Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella
Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin and her
sister Maria.
She remained in Florida with a York-
shire terrier named Fifi, and was a
fixture at yoga and pilates classes on
Delray Beach well into her nineties. “I
loved to dance and I was very lucky that
people let me,” she says in Lillie Cocker-
ille Livingston’s book American Indian
Ballerinas (1997). “I didn’t have any
blinding ambition or burning desire to
get ahead. I always seized the opportu-
nities that came my way, but I never had
a plan.”Marjorie Tallchief, American ballerina,
was born on October 19, 1926. She died
on November 30, 2021, aged 95Roger Phillips
World-leading expert on fungi whose bestselling
book Wild Food sparked a foraging craze
In 1940 at the height of the Blitz, Roger
Phillips was evacuated to his grandpar-
ents’ dairy farm in Hertfordshire. “It
just so happened that it must have been
a marvellous mushrooming year,” he
recalled. “I would go out into the fields
with these steel milking buckets and
bring them back brim-full of mush-
rooms. That was the start of it. My
grandmother would cook them up and
they sent a few buckets to market. I’d
get half a crown for each one.”
The experience led to him becoming
the world’s leading fungi fancier and
the guru of foraging. His field guides to
edible flora and fungi became bestsel-
lers and his 1983 book Wild Food: A
Unique Photographic Guide to Finding,
Cooking and Eating Wild Plants, Mush-
rooms and Seaweed launched a craze
that sent thousands into the woods in
search of nature’s edible bounty.
To many he was simply “the Mush-
room Man”, an eccentric figure in a
beret who resembled a fly agaric toad-
stool. Yet he was also held in high es-
teem in botanical circles for his expert-
ise. He dressed almost exclusively in
red because “he didn’t want to blend in
with anyone else... he wanted to stand
out and everyone to notice him”, his
daughter Lyla Foy said.
Every weekend when his children
were growing up they were taken out
foraging for wild food, regardless of the
weather. “It began when I worried that
my son was growing up a townie,” he
said. “We used to go out to a place at
Denham. Just set up camp, build a little
fire. It sort of took off. He would bring
his pals and their parents would come.
It was rather wonderful.”
In recent years he regularly joined
the musician and broadcaster Cerys
Matthews at her festival The Good Life
Experience in north Wales, where he
would take several hundred people into
the woods and cook up “wild food” over
a fire pit. To Matthews he was her “gate-
way to the natural world”, as he was to
countless others. His original Wild
Food book sold 750,000 copies and total
sales of his 40-plus books topped four
and a half million. They were often
written in collaboration with Martyn
Rix, of the Royal Horticultural Society.
“I was the straight one and he was the
hippy,” Rix said. One 12-month project
involved a search to classify and photo-
graph every British plant.
His enthusiasm made
him a natural on televi-
sion and he presented
gardening series for
the BBC and
Channel 4. He
turned the
communal
garden in
Eccleston
Square,
Pimlico,
where he lived,
into a plants-
man’s paradise
containing some 200
different climbing ro-
ses, 120 camellia spe-
cies and the national
collection of ceanothus.
He also served as chair-
man of the Society for theBased in Monte Carlo,
they were the golden
couple of postwar ballet
HULTON DEUTSCH/GETTY IMAGESOld friends march
to the beat of love
Marriages and engagements
Page 88ture gifted with soft yet nervous move-
ments of great stage effect,” noted the
critic Iréne Lidova.
The London public
was more reserved.
“Covent Garden
audiences were
much less emo-
tional... but the
season was a
complete
success,” Tall-
chief said, recall-
ing her perform-
ances here of Nijin-
ska’s Les Biches and
Lifar’s Aubade.
When her husband
moved into choreogra-
phy she danced roles for
him including in Annabel
Lee (1951), based on Edgar Al-
len Poe’s melancholy poem, and
Prisoner of the Caucasus (also 1951),
dancing both in London. “Of course, we
talked about his work at home,” she
said. “But as far as working with him in
the studio, it was no different from
working with anyone else.”
She continued to enjoy acclaim in
France and in 1956 was the first Amer-
ican ballerina première danseuse étoile
at the Paris Opéra Ballet, though some
historians argue that she was beaten by
13-year-old Augusta Maywood from
Philadelphia whose first Paris season
was in 1838 before she eloped with her
lover. Although Tallchief “reached my
full potential” at the Opéra, her dancing
partner Skibine became ballet master
during her second season, effectively
ending his performing career, and she
now felt lost. “I worked with excellent
partners at the Opéra,” she said. “But no
one could ever replace Youra.”
Marjorie Louise Tall Chief was born
in 1926 in Denver, Colorado, during a
family holiday. Her parents, Alexander
Tall Chief and his wife Ruth (née Por-
ter), who was of Scots-Irish descent,
were from Fairfax, Oklahoma; she had
two older siblings, Gerald and Maria,
who also became a renowned ballerina
(obituary, April 17, 2013).
In 1906 Alexander’s grandfather,
Chief Peter Bigheart, had negotiated
the rights to oil reserves with the US
government, making the Osage tribe
wealthy. Although tribal ceremonies
and rituals were banned, Alexander
took his daughters to “secret pow-
wows” in remote corners of the reserva-
tion. “My grandmother still speaks
Osage and wears an Indian costume,”
Tallchief told Dance Magazine in 1956.
She was six when her mother per-
suaded Alexander to move to Califor-
nia. They settled in Beverly Hills where
the Tall Chief sisters turned their name
into one word after teasing school-
mates asked if their father “took scalps”.
Marjorie took classes with Ernest
Belcher and led his corps de ballet in the
Shirley Temple film The Little Princess
(1939). When the choreographer
Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav,
opened a studio, Maria and Marjorie
received a rigorous training, though
Nijinska declared that “it would be dis-
astrous if they danced together because
each would cancel the other out”.
She joined Ballet Theatre (later
American Ballet Theatre), making her
debut in Montreal in 1944 and receiving
glowing reviews for her speed and
security. That season she also danced at
the Metropolitan Opera House, New
York, watching and learning from Ali-
cia Markova, Anton Dolin and Tamara
Toumanova. The impresario Sol Hurok
persuaded her to join Colonel Wassily
de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe as aTallchief with her
husband George
Skibine and in
London with her
sister Maria, far
right, in 1960