Vivian Van Damm

Who was Vivian Van Damm?

Vivian Van Damm was a prominent London theatre impresario from 1932 until 1960, managing the Windmill Theatre in London's Great Windmill Street, which was a British institution, famed for its pioneering tableaux vivants of motionless female nudity and for the myth of having 'never closed' during the Blitz.

Van Damm, known as 'VD', came from a middle-class London family of Dutch Jewish origin. He left school at 14 to work in a garage, and later abandoned the motor trade to manage West End cinemas and eventually he became an impresario.

In 1931, Laura Henderson had opened the tiny, one-tier Windmill Theatre as a playhouse, but it was not profitable and soon resorted to showing films. She then hired Van Damm and they produced Revudeville, a programme of continuous variety with 18 entertainment acts, but this was also a commercial failure, so they added the dimension of nudity to emulate the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge. The key element was Van Damm's exploitation of a legal loophole that nude statues could not be banned on moral grounds, and this led to the legendary "Windmill Girls". The girls had to remain motionless, the Lord Chamberlain's ruling being, "If you move, it's rude".To ward off criticism he used his own beautiful daughter, under the stage name of Betti Talbot, as one of the nudes. The Hollywood film Tonight and Every Night, starring Rita Hayworth, told some of the story of the Windmill, though it contained no nudity.