Margaret Kelly: Margaret Kelly, who has died aged 94, was the founder of the world-famous Bluebell Girls dance troupe and a leading personality in Parisian nightlife for 60 years. The troupe undertook many international tours, and by the time she retired she had trained over 10,000 girls and hundreds of Kelly Boys.
The statuesque Bluebell Girls, who still draw the crowds, are known for their beauty, flamboyant if scant attire and high-kicking dance routines. The troupe went topless after the dancers persuaded "Miss Bluebell" that it was not a problem.
She laid down stringent requirements for her dancers. Insisting on a minimum height of 5 ft 9 in, she looked for "long legs, a long neck, slim ankles and slim breasts". A background in ballet was essential.
Born on June 24th, 1910, at the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, she was the daughter of James Kelly and Margaret O'Brien. The unmarried couple left her in the care of Mary Murphy, a seamstress she knew as "Auntie", and she was brought up in Liverpool. Despite suffering from poor health, she had a happy childhood. Her piercing blue eyes prompted her nickname "Bluebell".
She attended ballet classes from the age of six, paying the fees by doing odd jobs. She made her stage debut at the age of 12 in a production of Babes in the Wood at Newquay. She became a full-time dancer in her early teens with a Scottish cabaret act, the Hot Jocks, and at 16 joined Alfred Jackson's troupe at the Scala Theatre, Berlin. Following a European tour in 1929, she was invited to join the famous Folies Bergère in Paris, quickly becoming a featured dancer.
On Jackson's retirement, she was asked to form her own troupe. Dancing during the intervals between films in a Paris cinema, Les Blue Belles Paramount Girls were an immediate success. Before long, she was running a second troupe.
In 1939 she married Marcel Leibovici, a composer and musician. When war broke out, she disbanded the company and sought to leave France. However, as a British passport-holder, she was arrested and interned at Besançon in south-east France. The Irish chargé d'affaires, Count O'Kelly, secured her release on the grounds that, as a native of Dublin, she should be regarded as a neutral.
Her husband was imprisoned in a camp for Jews in the Pyrenees. He escaped and she hid him in a Paris attic until the occupation ended. She survived interrogation by the Gestapo, a gunfight between black marketeers in a nightclub and a shoot-out between the Resistance and the Germans.
After the war she re-formed the Bluebell Girls, moving to the Lido de Paris, the glitzy revue on the Champs-Elysées, in 1948. She ran two shows a night, seven nights a week, attracting audiences of 500,000 each year. The shows changed every four years, with each costing £4 million to mount.
Known in the business as a "tigress", Kelly ran a tight ship. "Oh, yes, I'm strict all right," she acknowledged. "My girls know they'd better behave, or else they'd be out of a job."
She brought her troupe to Dublin in 1980 to perform at the Gaiety Theatre, her first visit since she left Ireland at the age of four. "I've been promising for years to come back. And now it really feels like what an Irish-American would say: 'Gee, it's great to be here!'"
Living in a luxury apartment near the Champs-Elysées, she could dance the can-can into her late 60s. In her final years she continued to dine out several times a week, never losing her taste for fine food and champagne, and she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.
A naturalised French citizen since 1948, she was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2000. Other honours included a crimson medal from the Hotel de Ville in 1984 to mark the 2,100th dinner show at the Lido, and an OBE in 1996. Predeceased by her husband and a son, she is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Margaret Kelly: born June 1910; died September 2004