[citation needed] Lotte Berk was born Lieselotte Heymansohn on 13 January 1913, in Cologne, Germany, to a German mother and Russian-born father, both of whom were Jewish.
[1] Her mother died of a stroke when Lotte was aged eight; her father, Nicolai Heymansohn, had been a tailor and owned a chain of menswear shops.
[2] At 18, Lotte was dancing with prominent companies, for famous choreographers and conductors including Carl Ebert, Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch, and at such events as the Salzburg Festival in Austria.
[2] With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, they fled Germany and because her husband had a British passport, the family was able to live in England, where Berk worked as a model at Heatherley School of Fine Art and danced at Covent Garden for Marie Rambert.
Her clients included Joan Collins, Britt Ekland, Barbra Streisand, Siân Phillips, Edna O'Brien and Yasmin Le Bon.