Jeanne Devereaux Perkins

PERKINS- Jeanne Devereaux Perkins 1912 - 2011 International Ballerina One of the last vaudevillians of her era, Jeanne Devereaux Perkins, born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1912, passed away peacefully of natural causes at a Pasadena nursing home on July 28, 2011. At age eleven she became an international ballerina on the public stages of variety entertainment in America and Europe during the 1920s through the 1940s. During her career she gave six thousand paid performances, as well as five hundred free benefit ones, for nearly fifty million people. In 1930-31 she made a Fox feature movie and another by Warner Bros. In 1935 she was the first ballerina to dance in a Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium since Anna Pavlova in 1912. During the 1940s she starred as a soloist at Radio City Music Hall, and in 1946 led the first USO troupe of performers to Japan shortly after the war ended. After her marriage to Thomas Perkins in 1952, she moved to Pasadena and directed the Devereaux Ballet Arts School until its closing in 1964. She was committed to historic preservation, and for almost forty years was a member of the Pasadena chapter of the Questers. Using her many extraordinary talents, she became a museum designer and consultant, a popular public lecturer, and from 1980 to 2008 a reader at the Huntington Library, where she researched a biography of Grace Nicholson, the pioneering woman whose home is now Pasadena's famous Pacific Asia Museum. Jeanne is survived by her beloved husband Thomas, her many loving friends, and the enduring spirit of the thousands of talented performers of her era. Donations in Jeanne's memory can be made to the Pacific Asia Museum and the Huntington Library.