Anne Rogers was born in Meltham and went on to become a glamorous international star of the ice in the 1940s and 1950s, seen be some as a trailblazer for Torvill and Dean.

Anne, who has died aged 89, was one of the leading British skaters to achieve international stardom in the post war Golden Age of ice spectaculars.

She was born Shirley Anne Quarmby on July 10, 1928, at Green Lea, her family’s West Yorkshire home at Meltham, the eldest of the four children of a business tycoon, Alexander Quarmby.

Her mother, Joan Evelyn Goddard, was the niece of one of Britain’s most celebrated solicitors, Theodore Goddard, who was to play a central role in the Abdication of King Edward VIII by acting for Wallis Simpson in her divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson.

Looking back in later years, Rogers mused: “I don’t know where it all came from. There were no performing links in my family. As a child I was passionate about dancing, especially ballet”.

It was a childhood attack of scarlet fever that helped to shape her unsuspected future.

“The doctors recommended strenuous exercise” she said, “and I chose ice skating.”

Anne Rogers ice dancing.

In 1935 at the age of seven she made her debut in an exhibition performance at the Queen’s Ice Rink in London, arranged for her by the celebrated ice choreographer Gladys Hogg.

But it was as a straight actress that she made her first show business bow at 13 as Tootles, one of the Lost Boys, in the 1942 production of Peter Pan, with Barbara Mullen as Peter, Alastair Sim as Hook and Joan Greenwood as Wendy.

Even as a child, Rogers had a quality that caught the eye of Britain’s leading theatre critic, James Agate, who pronounced her “a talent to watch.”

Her successful acting career included appearing in films with Huddersfield superstar James Mason in The Night Has Eyes, with Vivien Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra and with Patricia Burke in The Lisbon Story.

Then, out of the blue, came an offer to appear at the Ice Drome, Blackpool, in Ice Parade of 1943.

“My mother was aghast”, she recalled. “But it was for four times the salary I was earning in the theatre, so naturally I accepted.”

She never looked back, appearing both here and in the USA in many ice spectaculars.

She returned to Britain a fully fledged international skating star, and in 1949 became Tom Arnold’s first pantomime Principal Boy on ice in the title-role of Aladdin. In this she was reunited with a brilliant skater she had first worked with in Blackpool, Eddie Ward. They were married in 1950, and for the next decade, in a whole series of ice spectaculars, revues and pantomimes, were billed as “Britain’s leading romantic Pair Skating Stars.”

She said: “We did things that were unheard of then like skating to Wagner in our speciality dances. Thirty years later, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean took up the idea of using classical music on the ice and turned it into Olympic Gold, but in our day it was considered ground-breaking.”

In 1954, Rogers opened at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in her greatest hit, Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years On Ice, in which she, as Grete, and Eddie Ward as Franzel, were to tour Britain for more than two years, packing theatres and ice rinks everywhere.

Their son, Jeremy, was born in 1957, and their daughter, Alexandra, in 1959. Her marriage to Ward ended in 1960, and in 1962 she married another well-known skater, Jack Harnett, who died in 1986, the same year in which Eddie Ward also died from cancer at the age of 60.

Anne continued skating until well past her 70th year and in old age remained slim, elegant and astonishingly youthful.