David Balding, a producer of Broadway and Off Broadway plays who may have been best known as a circus showman who acted as a parent to an elephant, died on May 9 in Weldon Spring, Mo. He was 75.
His wife, Laura, said that he had severe arthritis and other ailments and that he died of a head injury after falling in their home.
Mr. Balding was the central human character — though he was not the star — of the 2011 documentary film “One Lucky Elephant,” about his relationship with Flora, the orphaned baby African elephant he bought and more or less adopted in 1984.
Mr. Balding, a natural impresario who had started his own theater company in his 20s and put on plays directed by Mike Nichols and Harold Pinter, had long wanted to build his own circus, and he placed Flora at the center of that dream, training her to perform and to collaborate with acrobats.
He and a handful of partners created Circus Flora, a family-friendly one-ring affair whose acts — one was a big-little equine comedy team featuring a Clydesdale and a miniature horse — were loosely stitched into a narrative and combined circus and theater techniques. Mr. Balding was the ringmaster.
Circus Flora made its debut at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., in 1986 and toured the United States until making a permanent home in 1988 in St. Louis.
Flora was part of the circus until 2000, when Mr. Balding, who had looked after her as if she were a member of his family, recognized that, as an adult elephant, she needed to live among her kind. The documentary, directed by Lisa Leeman, tells of his search for an appropriate home for her and their subsequent lives apart. In 2004, Flora moved to the Elephant Sanctuary, a natural-habitat refuge in Hohenwald, Tenn.
“There’s no denying the ‘aww’ appeal of a man and an elephant walking down a street, hand in trunk,” Manohla Dargis wrote in reviewing the film for The New York Times. She described it as the story of “a circus man and the wild animal he foolishly bought, helped to train, loved like a (captive) daughter and finally, tearfully, tried to do right by, mostly by letting her go.”
Ivor David Balding came from an animal-loving family. He was born on March 3, 1939, in Manhattan, a son of Ivor G. Balding and the former Frances Godwin. His father was one of three English brothers who had come to fame playing polo in the United States, mostly on Long Island. The elder Balding later became the stable, farm and racing manager for C. V. Whitney, a scion of the Whitney and Vanderbilt families and a breeder of thoroughbreds.
Young David grew up in the Whitney orbit, in Old Westbury, on Long Island, and in Lexington, Ky., where he helped care for the Whitney horses and Angus cattle. He attended the Green Vale School in Old Brookville on Long Island and the Brooks School in North Andover, Mass. Before attending Harvard, he was a summer assistant to the actress Eva Le Gallienne at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut and briefly worked for a circus in Paris.
Mr. Balding never graduated from Harvard, embarking instead on a career in theater. By 1963, he was in New York, having founded the Establishment Theater Company — his partners included Joseph E. Levine and Peter Cook — which produced, among other shows, “The Ginger Man,” an adaptation of J. P. Donleavy’s novel starring Patrick O’Neal, and “Scuba Duba,” Bruce Jay Friedman’s comedy about a cuckolded American in the South of France.
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On Broadway, Mr. Balding was a producer of “The Man in the Glass Booth,” Robert Shaw’s drama, directed by Harold Pinter, about a man who may or may not be a concentration camp survivor. It ran for more than 250 performances in 1968 and 1969.
Among his first shows was “The Knack,” an Off Broadway comedy by Ann Jellicoe about young men on the make, directed by a fresh new face, Mike Nichols, who had just had his first Broadway hit, “Barefoot in the Park.”
Mr. Nichols would later have occasion, when Flora was in New York to perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a show conceived by Martha Clarke, to house her on the grounds of his Connecticut home.
“She was a lovely elephant; we all loved her,” Mr. Nichols recalled in an interview on Tuesday. “I liked to show her to visitors and to feed her peanuts, of course — all the things you do when you have an elephant.”
In the 1970s, Mr. Balding returned to Europe, where, working for CBS, he created and was a co-producer of the Circus World Championships, an Olympic-style competition for circus performers. He later worked as a producer for the Big Apple Circus in New York and eventually moved to a farm in South Carolina that his father had bought. There he hatched plans for his circus, which he started with three partners.
In the meantime, Flora, who was born in Zimbabwe in 1982 and whose parents were killed in a culling, was sold to an elephant trainer and broker in California. Mr. Balding bought her and added her to a menagerie that included Jack, the Clydesdale. After a South Carolina neighbor who was on the board of the Spoleto festival introduced Mr. Balding to the festival’s director, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Circus Flora had its first booking. Nigel Redden, the current general director of the festival and then the general manager, recalled in an interview that during the festival’s opening ceremony, the mayor of Charleston rode through the city’s downtown area on Flora’s back.
In addition to his wife, the former Laura Carpenter, whom he married in 1994, Mr. Balding is survived by three sisters, Bettina Blackford, Pamela Jencks and Linda Shearer — and, of course, by Flora, who is still in Tennessee.
At the start of the documentary, Mr. Balding offers a simple explanation for the acquisition that ended up defining him.
“I wanted an elephant,” he says. “I wanted an elephant all my life.”
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