In 1896, Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York, but she soon became disillusioned with the form and craved a different environment with less of a hierarchy. She and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children. Isadora attended school from the ages of six to ten, but she dropped out, having found it constricting. Īfter her parents' divorce, Isadora's mother moved with her family to Oakland, California, where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher. Joseph Duncan, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in 1898 when the British passenger steamer SS Mohegan ran aground off the coast of Cornwall.

Although he avoided prison time, Isadora's mother (angered over his infidelities as well as the financial scandal) divorced him and from then on, the family struggled with poverty. Soon after Isadora's birth, her father was found to have been using funds from two banks he had helped set up to finance his private stock speculations. Her brothers were Augustin Duncan and Raymond Duncan her sister, Elizabeth Duncan, was also a dancer. Early life Īngela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922). She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. Angela Isadora Duncan (or – September 14, 1927) was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US.

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