Margot Fonteyn was close to retiring when Rudolf Nureyev became her partner
In 1961 Britain's leading ballerina was thinking about stepping down. Then a young Soviet star defected in Paris, and she agreed, somewhat reluctantly given the 19 years between them, to dance his London debut. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev became one of the most celebrated partnerships ballet has known.
She was born Margaret Hookham in Reigate in 1919 and started ballet at four, with her mother learning the basic positions alongside her so she could coach her properly. Her mother became such a fixture backstage that colleagues nicknamed her the Black Queen. Her father's engineering job took the family to China, and in Shanghai she studied with the Russian émigré Georgy Goncharov, which left her with a lifelong preference for fluid Russian style over drilled exercises. At 14 she returned to London and joined Ninette de Valois's Vic-Wells school.
Even her name took some finding. Her maternal grandfather was the Brazilian industrialist Antonio Fontes, but the Fontes relatives refused permission to use their name on stage. She and her mother searched the telephone directory for variations and settled on Fonteyn, which happens to be an old English spelling of fountain.
Frederick Ashton at first found her stubborn and unpolished, yet he kept creating roles for her, often frail or otherworldly figures, and after her success in Nocturne in 1936 he saw her as the company's future star. She succeeded Alicia Markova as its leading ballerina, partnered above all by Robert Helpmann, her favourite across her career. Her Sleeping Beauty became a signature for her and the company, and a 1949 tour of the United States made her internationally famous.
The partnership with Nureyev began in Giselle on 21 February 1962, and the pair drove each other to new heights; Ashton made Marguerite and Armand especially for them. Her personal life was harder. Her husband, the Panamanian politician Roberto Arias, whom she had first met as a Cambridge student, was left paralysed after being shot in 1964, and she cared for him for the rest of his life. Named prima ballerina assoluta in 1979, she retired to Panama and died in 1991, exactly 29 years after that first Giselle.
Source: Margot Fonteyn
