Richardson, Carie (Lesley)

BORN LESLEY RICHARDSON IN JULY 1943, in South Perth, Australia, the daughter of Charles and Phyll Richardson, even at three years old, her big desire was to come out in front of a red velvet curtain and bow to all the people. Her father Charles served in the RAAF, and Phyll ran a bakery, then a florist shop, and later a plant nursery. As she grew older came a yearning to travel and see the countries pictured in her storybooks. Richardson moved to Melbourne while still a newborn and lived in bayside Cheltenham. She attended junior school on the beach at Mentone Girls Grammar. In her teens, she moved to Townsville with her family, where she medalled in swimming at school and took up ballet.

Returning to Cheltenham, the young dancer enrolled briefly at the Melbourne Academy of Russian Ballet, the Borovansky ballet school. At 15, she started ice-skating at St Moritz Ice Palais in St Kilda, inspired by a poster for Swan Lake of Austrian skating champion Ingrid Wendl. Not quite 16, she began lessons with Jack Gordon like most top skaters in Australia and New Zealand. Quick to learn skating and ballet, she retired as an amateur at 17 to turn professional in 1961.

Richardson joined the chorus of Pat Gregory's Ice Follies of 1962, which toured Australia. Its apache number danced by Wim de Jong and Dorothy Dee inspired her to become an adagio skater. American Bill Christopher, who also skated in the show, introduced her by letter to Terry Rudolph at the Casa Carioca nightclub, high in the Bavarian Alps. Known as Carie professionally, she lived and worked there in Garmisch from 1962 until former Olympic champion, Dick Button, picked her for his Ice-travaganza show at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair.

Returning home for six months of 1967, she skated a solo blues number in a small nightclub show. The following year, she and a friend joined the chorus of Holiday On Ice Australia. The show toured many cities: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Israel, Spain, and Portugal, then on to South America, where she met the Dutch skater Joop van der Sluijs, her skating partner to be. Offered a contract as an adagio pair with the company, they refined their routine touring the Far East.

In 1970 the pair accepted a contract with Ice Holiday in New Delhi, India, choreographed by Australia's Reg Park. In 1971, they skated exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, and later that year, the International Ice Spectacular over six months, again choreographed by Reg Park in apartheid South Africa. In 1972, Carie and Joop skated in the show Paris Sur Glase in Bulgaria, and at the Lido Nightclub Paris.

The couple performed in Sleeping Beauty On Ice from Christmas 1972 and Aladdin On Ice in London in 1974, each choreographed by Reg Park for Britain's King Of Pantomime, Tom Arnold. In between, the team skated with star billing in another fabulously staged nightclub show at the big Casino du Liban in Beirut, Lebanon.

The adagio pair joined Holiday On Ice Europe in 1975. In early April, they won the title of World Professional Pair Champions at Jaca in the Spanish Pyrenees. At thirty-two, Richardson was the first Australian woman to win a world professional title since Sadie Cambridge in the 1930s. Judged by a panel that included Jacques Gerschwiler, the team beat out four others for the title, and continued touring Europe with Holiday in 1976.

The year after, Richardson joined her fiancé in Athens near where he worked on an oil rig in the Mediterranean, and they moved to Singapore in 1978. She taught skating at the ice rink at Kallang Park and coached Go Skate Inline Skating the following year. She produced, directed, choreographed, and skated in a show at the opening of a Go Skate rink in Surabaya, Indonesia.

Approaching forty in 1982, Richardson choreographed an exhibition in which she also skated at the opening of an ice rink at City Plaza Hong Kong. She returned a year later with her production, Carie Richardson's Ice Fantasy, in which she was again a skater and choreographer.

Personal highlights of a long international career were winning the World's Professional Pair Skating championships, starring at the Lido in Paris, and starring in Holiday On Ice all over the world. For nearly a quarter-century since turning professional in 1961, Carie Richardson flew across the ice of forty or fifty countries, jumping, spinning and twirling her way through the constellations above every continent except Antarctica.

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Carie and Joop forged an act on the mercurial surface of show ice from the blistering circuit of international tours, working hard and partying harder. Carie's story is here:

The Adagio Flier: Carie Richardson's adventurous journey