Margot Fonteyn

Margaret Evelyn Hookham was born in Reigate, Surrey, on 18 May 1919, and was known in childhood as Peggy. She began ballet lessons at the age of four in Ealing, and when her father's work took the family to China she studied in Shanghai with the Russian emigre teacher George Goncharov. Returning to England in 1933, she trained with Serafina Astafieva and entered Ninette de Valois's Sadler's Wells school, making early company and solo appearances as a student - among them Young Tregennis in de Valois's The Haunted Ballroom. Her professional name, Margot Fonteyn, adapted the surname Fontes from her mother's Brazilian family. (A few archival catalogue records give 1918 as her birth year, but the principal ballet institutions and commemorative sources support 1919.)

Her rise was extraordinarily rapid. After Alicia Markova left the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1935, Fonteyn inherited leading roles and became the young company's central ballerina, with Robert Helpmann as a crucial early partner. Even more consequential was her artistic relationship with the choreographer Frederick Ashton, who recognized not only her line and lyricism but her capacity to make choreography look psychologically inevitable. Across the following decades he made or shaped roles for her in works including Apparitions, Symphonic Variations, Cinderella, Daphnis and Chloe, Sylvia, Ondine, Homage to the Queen and, eventually, Marguerite and Armand. That dialogue between ballerina and choreographer became one of the foundations on which a distinct English ballet style and repertoire were built.

Fonteyn matured as an artist through the Second World War, when the company toured at home under difficult conditions and ballet became part of Britain's wartime cultural life. Her defining postwar moment came on 20 February 1946, when Sadler's Wells Ballet reopened the Royal Opera House with The Sleeping Beauty; Fonteyn danced Princess Aurora opposite Helpmann's Prince Florimund, announcing both the company's arrival at Covent Garden and her own authority in the grand classical repertory. Aurora remained inseparable from her public image - its clarity, poise, musical balance and unfolding dramatic maturity matched her gifts.

By the late 1940s and 1950s Fonteyn had become an international emblem of British ballet, her audience extended by tours, television and film. Michael Somes became a major partner in this period, and Ashton continued to reveal new colours in her artistry - radiant classicism, wit, romantic vulnerability and elemental mystery, most strikingly in the title role of Ondine (1958). She became president of the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1954, its longest-serving president, and in the 1956 New Year Honours was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to ballet. In 1955 she married Roberto 'Tito' Arias, a Panamanian diplomat, becoming formally Margot Fonteyn de Arias, and her life was drawn into Panamanian political history: in April 1959 she was detained amid the aftermath of an attempted uprising associated with Arias. Government records released decades later show the episode was more complicated than the once-popular picture of an uninvolved spouse, though the surviving accounts still call for cautious phrasing about motive and degree of agency.

Fonteyn appeared to be approaching retirement when Rudolf Nureyev, nineteen years her junior, entered her artistic life after his 1961 defection. On 21 February 1962 they danced Giselle together at the Royal Opera House to an extraordinary reception. Their contrast generated unusual theatrical electricity: her cultivated equilibrium and dramatic restraint met his appetite for danger and expansion, and the partnership renewed her career while giving Nureyev a collaborator whose authority made their performances far more than displays of virtuosity. Ashton created Marguerite and Armand specifically for them, premiered on 12 March 1963, and the pair became international stars through Giselle, Swan Lake, Le Corsaire, La Bayadere and other repertory. Their bond is best understood as a documented artistic partnership and lifelong loyalty, not through the romantic speculation that later attached to it.

In 1964 Arias was shot in Panama and left with permanent, severe disability, and Fonteyn continued performing while helping to support and care for him. The following year she and Nureyev danced the title roles at the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet - though the roles were created on Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, so her celebrated Juliet was a mature interpretation of a part made through another dancer's body rather than choreographed on her. She went on dancing well beyond the age at which many ballerinas retire, and that longevity became part of her legend. The Royal Ballet marked her sixtieth birthday in 1979 with a gala - including Ashton's Salut d'amour a Margot Fonteyn - at which it recognized her as its prima ballerina assoluta. She retired to a cattle farm in Panama to care for Arias while retaining public roles, serving from 1981 until her death as Chancellor of Durham University, the first non-royal woman to hold a British university chancellorship. She made her final appearance in a role as the Queen in The Sleeping Beauty in Miami in February 1986, and died of cancer in Panama City on 21 February 1991, aged 71.