Marie Polly Cuninghame (ca. 1785,

Bordeaux Bordeaux ( , ; Gascon oc, Bordèu ; eu, Bordele; it, Bordò; es, Burdeos) is a port city on the river Garonne in the Gironde department, Southwestern France. It is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefectur ...

– 9 April 1837,

De Bilt De Bilt () is a municipality and town in the province of Utrecht, Netherlands. It had a population of in . De Bilt houses the headquarters of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). It is the ancestral home and namesake for the pro ...

), known after her marriage as Polly de Heus, was a Dutch ballet dancer. After ballet training in

she danced briefly in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

and

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

. She was then contracted by the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, where she danced from 1801 until 1823, making this period a high point for ballet in Amsterdam.Marjo Barthels, Cuninghame, Marie Polly, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/data/cuninghame 3/01/2014 In 1807 she married a widower and manufacturer 20 years her senior, Hendricus de Heus.

References

1780s births 1837 deaths Dutch ballerinas French ballerinas Entertainers from Bordeaux 19th-century Dutch ballet dancers {{ballet-bio-stub