Paulette Harwood began dancing on the theatre district’s stages as a teenager and was performing in New York City while still in high school. Then she returned to Greater Boston to run premier dance studios during a life that seemed choreographed to never stay still.
“I can’t ever remember not wanting to dance,” she told the Globe in 2010, when she was teaching ballet four days a week — at 82. “My mother used to say I didn’t walk down the street, I danced down the street.”
For 58 years, generations of dancers perfected their discipline at Paulette’s Ballet Studio under the exacting eyes of Mrs. Harwood, who was 91 when she died Friday. She had only closed her Newton business last year, while recuperating from a fall that had left her with a couple of serious fractures.
“Maybe that’s the good Lord trying to tell me it’s time to quit,” Mrs. Harwood, who had lived in Needham, mused last August to the Brookline Tab, though she wasn’t yet ready to shelve her dancing shoes and hoped to rise anew to teach master classes at another school.
For someone who had debuted on stage as a teenager in the early 1940s Boston production of “The Merry Widow,” featuring Kitty Carlisle, life always meant movement.
Those who learned to dance under her tutelage have gone on to dance in musicals and movies — on Broadway in New York, in Las Vegas shows, and even along the sidelines as New England Patriots cheerleaders.
“There is nowhere that I’ve ever gone that somebody hasn’t come up and said to me, ‘I studied with your mother,’ ” said her daughter Paula, who has lived in New York and Los Angeles.
“The amount of people she has influenced or taught always just boggles my mind — how far her reach has been over the 58 years she was teaching,” Paula added.
Mrs. Harwood’s aspirations as a teacher were somewhat less grand when she started, however.
“For selfish reasons, I wanted to teach my babies,” she recalled in the Brookline Tab interview. “When the youngest graduated, I thought my work was over.”
Hardly. After her daughters had finished, she kept going.
With the poise and posture of the Radio City Music Hall ballerina she had once been, Mrs. Harwood presided over dance classes even when the toll of age and declining health sometimes meant teaching while sitting, rather than offering guidance while stepping nimbly from one student to the next.
And she kept close watch over the cultural evolution of dancing, not always impressed by what she saw, especially the proliferation of competitions.
“That’s not what dancing is. Be the best of your ability and not your neighbor’s,” she told the Brookline Tab. “We’re not a competition, we’re an art.”
Born in Leominster in 1927, she was the daughter of Pauline LaCharite and Sylvio Martin. Her mother had attended New England Conservatory and had modeled and danced. Her father ran an insurance business. Mrs. Harwood was barely taking her first steps when her parents divorced.
She began taking dancing lessons as a young girl and soon studied with Harriet Hoctor, a prominent ballerina and actress from New York City who opened a school in Boston.
“She just floated,” Phyllis Nayor, a longtime friend who also had studied with Hoctor, said in a 2010 Globe interview of Mrs. Harwood’s youthful abilities. “Her leaps were very good and very beautiful to watch.”
At 14, Mrs. Harwood skipped school to audition for a Boston Opera House production of “The Merry Widow” and landed a role as a dancer.
That led to a multi-month run as a professional and a decision to move to New York City to dance in establishments such as Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. “The nightclubs were the rage of everything,” she told the Globe in 2010.
Living there with her maternal grandmother, she continued as a student at Brookline High School for her junior year and part of her senior year under a correspondence arrangement that was unusual for the era.
“She got a big envelope every week from the school with her assignments and had to mail it back when she was done,” said her daughter Pauline Harwood Wright of Hopedale.
After graduating in 1945, Mrs. Harwood moved to New York full time and joined the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall, where the schedule was rigorous.
“We were dancing four shows a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Mrs. Harwood told the Globe in 2005.
Several years later, she seriously injured an ankle during a leap into the arms of an inattentive male partner, who failed to catch her.
Returning to Boston to recuperate, she met Paul Harwood on a blind date, and they married in 1952.
“My very charming father, who was the life of the party — he charmed her,” Pauline said. “He had a cleft chin and curly hair and a twinkle in his eye and his Irish wit, and that was it.”
Mrs. Harwood’s mother had remarried and ended up running her second husband’s oil company after he died. Paul Harwood, a former engineering graduate of Tufts College, worked for many years as an executive in that business, too. He died in 1996.
As a mother, Mrs. Harwood “was a perfectionist and she always expected us to do our best in everything we did, no matter what it was,” Pauline said.
Nevertheless, “she allowed us to be creative,” Pauline added. “Paula and I danced on the coffee tables growing up. My mother never told us we couldn’t dance on the coffee tables.”
Through all the time Mrs. Harwood ran her business, with studios in Newton and Medfield for many years, “we always knew we came first,” Pauline said.
In addition to her daughters Pauline and Paula, Mrs. Harwood leaves another daughter, Paulette Harwood Rigo of Atlanta; a brother, John Martin of Manchester, N.H.; and seven grandchildren.
A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Thursday in St. Bartholomew Church in Needham. Burial will follow in St. Joseph Cemetery in West Roxbury.
In January, the Newton-Needham Regional Chamber honored Mrs. Harwood with a lifetime achievement award. “Paulette Harwood touched the lives of generations,” Greg Reibman, the organization’s president, said in a statement before the ceremony.
She used to tell her students that the discipline of dancing must be accompanied by discipline in all parts of life.
“Take good care of your health between tonight and a week from tonight,” she encouraged a room full of dancers at the end of a class in 2005. “You’re doing a great job, and I’m proud of you.”
In the Brookline Tab interview a year ago, Mrs. Harwood stressed that her classes were always about more than artistic grace. “I teach them life skills, not just dance skills,” she said.
For decades of students, those lessons endured.
“She was extraordinarily passionate and talented and creative,” her daughter Paula said. “So many people have reached out to my sisters and me to say thanks — thanks for her.”
Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.