BELITA was an Olympic athlete at 13, a star of the London stage at 14 and toured the US at 15. Three years later she appeared in her first film as one of the skaters in Ice-Capades (1941), a film written around the touring ice show of which she was a star.

Claude Langdon, the impresario who ran Empress Hall, London, for many years was instrumental in setting Belita on the stairway to success when he featured her in his 1937 Rhapsody on Ice at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The show opened on her 14th birthday.

Belita later starred in several of Langdon’s ice shows at Empress Hall in the 1950s. These included Babes in the Wood (as Robin Hood); Jack and the Beanstalk; the celebrated White Horse Inn on Ice with the great comic Max Wall; Wildfire with the singer Frankie Vaughan; and London Melody in which the comedian Norman Wisdom also featured.

Belita Gladys Olive Lyne Jepson-Turner was born in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, in 1923, and began dancing at the age of 2, and soon after was also ice skating. She went on to star in ballet with Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, as Dolin’s partner, in England and Europe, and was a member of the 1936 British ice-skating team at the Winter Olympic Games at Garmisch and Partenkirchen, Bavaria.

After she had appeared with Dolin in France in The Blue Bird her professional career began at Covent Garden in Rhapsody on Ice, but an accident there led her mother to take her to California for treatment. She joined a New York ballet company, then starred in the famous ice spectacular Ice-Capades on tour throughout the US for two years before being offered a Hollywood recording contract with Monogram.

Her film credits, as an actress, dancer and ice skater, included several low-budget productions but also some extravaganzas, such as Silk Stockings (1957). Besides the light entertainment of Ice-Capades; Silver Skates (1943); Lady Let’s Dance (1944);and the Clark Gable film Never Let Me Go (1956); there were big-budget film noir productions such as Suspense (1946), in which she had to skate backwards through a doorway lined with blades; and The Gangster (1947). These films were very successful and Monogram — known as a “poverty row” studio — recouped its investment and changed its name to Allied Artists.

In the 1950s, in addition to appearing in the Claude Langdon ice shows in London, she toured her own show, Champagne on Ice, in England, appearing with it at the London Hippodrome for the impresario Bernard Delfont. She also made an appearance at Eagle Court in a water show with the Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller.

While making the film Man on the Eiffel Tower she met the actor Charles Laughton and worked in his repertory company in The Cherry Orchard. The starring role of Lola in the hit American musical Damn Yankees at the London Coliseum came her way in 1957, and in New York Burgess Meredith offered her the role of Zoe in Ulysses in Night Town with Zero Mostel, which she played with great success in New York, London, Paris and throughout Europe before settling down in London. She stopped performing on ice in 1956, and was last seen on the screen in the Argentinan juvenile delinquency film, La Terraza, in 1963.

She married Joel Riordan in 1946; they divorced in 1957. She married secondly the actor James Kenny, whom she met while appearing in Ulysses. From 1968 to 1983 they ran a garden centre in London, but after his death she retired to the South of France.

Her last public appearance was in November 1981, at the Madison Square Garden arena in New York, where she was persuaded to take part in a charity event, Superskates, in aid of the US Olympic Fund. She had been located by David Jacobs for the TV show Where are They Now?

Claude Langdon once said of her: “Belita is an artiste from the tips of her fingers to the blades of her skates, and she is almost equally talented as a straight actress, a pianist, ballerina and swimmer.”

She had no children.

Belita, actress, dancer and ice show performer, was born on October 21, 1923. She died on December 18, 2005, aged 82.