HOLLYWOOD — The studio sat up a narrow flight of stairs above a Boulevard storefront, and generations of Hollywood children learned the same two things on the first day: how to climb those stairs quietly, and how to stand once they reached the top.

Vera Lindqvist ran the studio for sixty years, long enough that the small ones filing in at the end were the grandchildren of the ones she had started with. She died June 2 at a hospital in Los Feliz, her family said, after a short illness. She was 85.

The room itself was plain. A sprung wooden floor gone pale where feet had worn it. A wall of mirrors with a crack in one panel she never bothered to replace. A barre she had installed herself, an upright piano, and, later, a cassette deck she never quite retired. She taught ballet mostly, some tap, whatever the neighborhood’s children needed, with a Scandinavian exactness that softened over the decades without ever fully going away.

“She could correct your arm with two fingers and one word, and you’d feel it for a week,” said Camille Ordóñez, 44, who studied with Lindqvist as a girl and later sent her own daughter up the same stairs. “She wasn’t warm the way people mean it now. She was something better. She paid attention. She saw you, and she expected something of you, and for a kid that turns out to be a kind of love you don’t recognize until much later.”

Vera Lindqvist was born in 1940 in Malmö, Sweden, and trained in Copenhagen before coming to the United States in her early twenties, chasing a company job that fell through before she arrived. She landed in Hollywood instead, taught out of a church hall to pay rent, and opened the walk-up studio in the mid-1960s. She never danced professionally in any way she cared to discuss. She taught, and she considered the teaching the truer vocation.

A few of her students went on to dance for real companies; most did not, and she claimed not to keep score. What she kept instead was posture — she could spot a former pupil across a grocery store by the way they stood — and a shelf of recital programs going back to the 1960s, the same family names repeating down the years as one child followed another up the stairs.

She is survived by a son, Anders Lindqvist of Seattle; a longtime partner, Ruth Halloran of Los Feliz; and, by the family’s own count, “a few thousand former students, most of whom still stand up straight.” She never married. Her studio closed quietly during her illness this spring, and the space above the storefront is empty now.

The mirrors are still up in that empty room, cracked panel and all. A niece who went to clear it out said she found, taped inside the lid of the piano where only the teacher would ever see it, a small handwritten card in Swedish. Translated, it read: feet on the floor, chin up, begin.