Until her retirement in at the age of 60, Dame Margot was a miracle of timelessness in the mercurial world of ballet. Just as legendary was the partnership she formed with the famed Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Queen Elizabeth II made her a dame - the female equivalent of a knight - in He had just gotten off a plane in Chicago, where he is performing.
I was just very happy to know her. During a recent visit to New York, Dame Margot told an interviewer that personality is conveyed across the footlights. One of her final public appearances was in May, when she was given a standing ovation in the royal box at a gala in her honor at the Royal Opera House. They saw each other in and and then not again for 14 years. They were married in and he was made Panamanian ambassador to Britain. In , when he was running for office in Panama, bullets from an assassination attempt left him paralyzed.
Born Peggy Hookham in Reigate, Surrey, the future ballerina moved to China with her family at age 9, and spent much of her childhood there.
Her ballet career began when she was spotted in the early s by Dame Ninette de Valois and invited to join the Vic-Wells Ballet, now the Royal Ballet, at Margot joined him but the invasion was a total failure. In Margot was thinking of retirement she was 43 from ballet when she met Rudolf Nureyev who had fled from the Soviet Union. Young Rudolf Nureyev revitalized Margot and led to some of her most wonderful performances.
In , just when Margot was thinking about divorcing him, Tito was shot five times and from then he was paralyzed from the neck down. Margot flew to his side and from then on was his nurse as well as the wife he had never let her be before. Although she knew how he had had many affairs she dedicated the rest of her life to him.
It was mainly because of the money she needed to care for Tito that she kept dancing long after most dancers would have retired. She attracted some bad publicity by performing in apartheid South Africa and in the Chile run by the military dictators.
As a dancer she made her last appearance in Nureyev's summer season, and in February aged 66 she appeared on stage for the last time, as 'The Queen' in "The Sleeping Beauty", for the Birmingham Royal Ballet in Miami. She subsequently retired to Panama where she and Tito ran a cattle stud. When Tito died in Margot discovered that he had mortgaged their farm and she had to auction all her jewelry to pay for her own medical care for the newly discovered cancer.
Dame Margot died on February 21st She was buried in the Arias family plot in Panama beside her Tito. Sign In. Edit Margot Fonteyn. Showing all 27 items. George Balanchine said of Fonteyn "Hands like spoons, can't dance a step", which was typical for Balanchine, who only commented on dancers with whom he wanted to work. After that they started working together on a ballet for Sadler's Wells.
Her mother was an illegitimate daughter of a Portuguese man and an English woman. His surname was Fontes, the Portuguese for Fountains, which gave Fonteyn. At four years of age her mother signed her and her older brother up for ballet classes. Nureyev was also relatively short 5-foot-8 but his tousled hair and hollow features stood in marked contrast to her pristine beauty. There was an animal magnetism that intrigued not only critics and audiences but the two of them as well.
Perhaps he had a certain respect for me because I was much older and was already famous and I had a respect for him because he was this extraordinary here she paused. I have not met any woman dancer who has the femininity of Margot, which for me is a superlative compliment equivalent to saying that she is a goddess. Their greatest triumph was considered the Feb.
She left occasionally to teach master classes and promote the PBS series she hosted. Always pragmatic about her art, she once assessed her career by observing that the happiest times may not have been on stage. But, I notice, they lasted.
Thursday night, the Royal Opera House audience stood silently in her honor, many possibly able to recall those lasting performances there.
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