Last week, British actress and dancer Moira Shearer died at age 80. Although her most famous film may still be analyzed in college women’s studies classes, many of you young pups may not know it, which is why I want you to watch it when you can. Released in 1948, it’s called “The Red Shoes,” and it’s a vivid retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of a ballerina whose bewitched red shoes overpower her. When I was a girl, I would watch this melodramatic film and, like a lot of girls back then, utterly drink it in. It may even have led me into feeling, by the time I was a teenager, that I was destined for a nervous breakdown. (Happily, the big breakdown never came.)

In “The Red Shoes,” Shearer plays the dancing star who has fallen in love and is, in today’s parlance, trying to balance family and career. Like in the fairy tale, life doesn’t turn out so well for her (“you can’t have it all!” seems to be the message), but as you watch her flail, you’ll identify with the difficulties of holding onto what is most dear.

The fabulous, fiery Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes has really put the spotlight on this story of a woman’s destruction, and revealed it to be a parable that must be surmounted instead of adopted. Here’s an audio tape of Estes–herself a great powerhouse–lecturing on “The Red Shoes” and the fight for the soul.

Based on what I’ve read in the obituaries, it sounds like Shearer had a fulfilling life: she married a journalist who was later knighted by Queen Elizabeth, raised four children, continued to speak and act. She always thought “The Red Shoes” offered a preposterous story, and she felt that no wrenching decision between art and life was truly necessary, for her at least. In this interview, she says, “…I’ve always found my marriage and my children infinitely more important than any career, so no great decision had to be made.”