Gai Pearl Marshall was a talented dancer who went on to become the doyenne of fashion public relations. She started her dancing career with the Bluebell Girls, appeared regularly on Italian television and later handled the publicity for Jean Muir, Missoni and Moschino. A flamboyant woman, she captured the hearts of several Italian actors during the many years she spent in that country.

Gai Henriette Pearl was born in 1933 to Hym and Eva Pearl, of Golders Green, North London. During the Second World War she was evacuated, aged 8, to Panama to stay with family friends. After four years there she was put on an American aircraft carrier to travel back to England. During the voyage the first signs of her future career emerged — as a 12-year-old she gave dancing exhibitions on the lower deck for the crew.

Back in Britain Pearl Marshall’s talent was nurtured when she attended Cone Ripman, the dancing school in Tring, Hertfordshire. After graduating she became a chorus dancer in a review at the Victoria Palace and went on to audition for the Bluebell Girls. She was too short by their standards, but was taken on nevertheless when she displayed her skills.

A tour to Italy with the Bluebells led to her love for the country and she settled there for the next 20 years. As well as stage performances, she began to work with Hermes Pan, who was Fred Astaire’s principal choreographic collaborator, and appeared in Uno, Due, Tre, a popular musical variety show broadcast on Sundays. She was courted by the Italian actors Vittorio Gassman and Walter Chiari.

At a dinner with Chiari she made two acquaintances who would prove pivotal to her later career. Tai and Rosita Missoni were just starting their knitwear design business and, when a jealous partner caused Pearl Marshall to give up dancing, she began to work for their company in 1964.

Later she returned to England to work as the vendeuse and PR in Jean Muir’s showroom and went on to take jobs with John Bates, launching the John Bates Couture collection, Victor Edelstein, Pauline Wynne Jones and Jean and Martin Pallant. She then returned to Missoni, working as its public relations executive in England.

Pearl Marshall was popular with the press for being equally friendly to senior and junior editors alike.

She believed that the trick to being a good PR was to work only with the collections that the press wanted to feature and therefore agreed to help to launch the zany collection of the designer Franco Moschino. His was a style she thought the English could appreciate.

Pearl Marshall’s association with Moschino ended with the opening of his shop in Conduit Street in the 1990s, after which she returned to work as PR for Missoni, an association that lasted for 40 years. A week before she went into hospital in September, she was still on the telephone to Italy, chasing requests and even, ever positive, ordering a few pieces from the spring/summer pre-collection for 2009 that she knew would suit her.

She was married to Jim Marshall in 1976. He survives her. They had no children.

Gai Pearl Marshall, dancer and fashion PR, was born on July 5, 1933. She died of complications from emphysema on September 12, 2008, aged 75