Who

A renowned choreographer, Twyla Tharp is known for taking a wrecking ball to the wall between modern dance and ballet.

Backstory

An Indiana native and daughter of a car dealer, Tharp started dancing when she was four. She first enrolled at Pomona and then moved to New York to attend Barnard; after graduating in 1963 with an art history degree, she trained with dance world icons Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, concurrently studying at the American Ballet Theater. She soon moved on to Paul Taylor's dance company, defecting again in 1965 to form her own dance troupe, Twyla Tharp Dance. Since then, she's choreographed some 130 dances for the American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet, and of course for her own company. Her noteworthy works include Deuce Coup (performed to the music of the Beach Boys), As Time Goes By (to the music of Fats Waller), and Push Comes to Shove (a 1976 collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov); it was Tharp, too, who choreographed the dances in the 1979 film version of Hair. A notorious perfectionist—she's known for hounding her dancers until they get their moves exactly right—Tharp is credited with creating dances that fuse modern dance with ballet.

Of note

Although she's long been considered a queen in the world of dance, she became something of a household name in 2002 with Movin' Out, the jukebox musical set to the songs of Billy Joel. The production was Tharp's biggest commercial success—it ran on Broadway for three years—and also went over nicely with the critics, earning the Tony Award for Best Musical and Tharp herself the Tony for Best Choreography. Alas, things didn't go as smoothly with 2006's The Times They Are A-Changin', which was set to Bob Dylan's music. Featuring dances based on such toe-tappers as "Blowing in the Wind," the show was almost universally panned—"when a genius [Tharp] goes down in flames, everybody feels the burn," cringed the Times' Ben Brantley—and it closed less than a month after it opened.

Trophy case

In addition to three Tony awards and two Emmys, Tharp earned a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992.

In print

Tharp has published two books, a 1993 autobiography called Push Comes to Shove (named after her famous dance), which recounts her rise to stardom and her multiple run-ins with alcoholism; and 2003's The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use it For Life, which was published by her friend David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster.

Personal

Tharp was once married to the painter Robert Huot. Their son, Jesse Huot, has been Tharp's business manager for more than a decade. Over the years, she's had romances with Mikhail Baryshnikov, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and rock promoter Bill Graham. Now unattached, Tharp lives in a Central Park West penthouse which she expanded when she acquired an adjacent unit to install a dance studio in 1992.

No joke

Tharp reportedly insists on eating half a pound of roast beef for lunch everyday. Carnivorousness seems to be hardwired into her name, too: She's named after Twila Thornburg, the "Pig Princess" of the 89th annual Muncie Fair in Indiana.