Dame Gillian Barbara Lynne DBE (née Pyrke; 20 February 1926 – 1 July 2018) was an English ballerina, dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre-television director, noted for her theatre choreography associated with two of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

Gillian Barbara Pyrke was born in Bromley, Kent, and was a precocious dance talent from an early age, teaming with her childhood friend Beryl Grey while still at school, and dancing to blot out the tragedy of the violent death of her mother on 8 July 1939 in Coventry (as a result of a car crash along with Edward Turner's first wife), when Lynne was just 13 years old.

With the opening of the Royal Opera House after the War she received her first major solo in Sleeping Beauty on the night of her 20th birthday.

[citation needed][4] Leaving Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1951 she was an instant success at the London Palladium as the star dancer and subsequently in the West End in such roles as Claudine in Can-Can at the Coliseum Theatre.

She was also a prolific television choreographer and director notably for The Muppet Show series and winning the 1987 BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award for her direction and choreography of A Simple Man, which starred Moira Shearer.

She choreographed the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Secret Garden, which ran at Stratford in 2000 and then transferred to the West End, running at the Aldwych Theatre from February 2001 to June 2001.

Lynne choreographed the 90-minute Las Vegas Production of The Phantom of the Opera which opened in the Summer of 2006, and directed I Want to Teach the World to Sing!

[citation needed] In October 2011, Lynne choreographed the 25th Anniversary production of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall.

She was both choreographer and director for the musical Dear World, which played an engagement at The Charing Cross Theatre, London, in February and March 2013, and starred Betty Buckley.