Maurice Mouvet

Mouvet suffered from tuberculosis and, after collapsing during a performance in 1922, was advised to move to the mountains to alleviate the condition.

Mouvet was born in Chelsea, in Brooklyn, New York, on March 18, 1889, to a family of Belgian origin.

His route to work took him past a restaurant and Mouvet persuaded the doorman to let him in to watch the dancing there.

Mouvet began professional dance lessons at the age of 15, learning on the job at the Nouveau Cirque, having demonstrated a few cakewalk steps to its manager.

In 1910 he was offered a contract at the Café de Paris in New York where he danced the Viennese waltz and the Argentine tango with partner Madelaide D'Arville.

Despite fears of police raids for immorality he introduced the apache to his late night performances.

The couple claimed to have been the first Americans to entertain troops on the Western Front of the First World War.

Mouvet and Walton, 1913
A woman and a man in a dance pose together, on the deck of a ship, in the 1920s
Leonora Hughes and Maurice Mouvet on a ship's deck in the 1920s, from the Library of Congress