Background

Ethnicity: Fonteyn's mother, Hilda Fontes Hookham, was a daughter of a Brazilian father and an Irish mother.

Margot Fonteyn was born in Reigate, England, on May 18, 1919 as Margaret Hookham. Her father was Felix Hookham, an English engineer from a family with a longstanding interest in music, who had grown up in Brazil. Margot's mother Hilda Fontes Hookham had a Brazilian father and an Irish mother. Margot had one brother, Felix.

Education

Margot and her brother grew up happily in the London suburb of Ealing. She began dance classes at the age of four at a local dance school. Her father accepted a position as chief engineer of a tobacco company in Shanghai when Fonteyn was eight years old. In Shanghai, she took ballet lessons from the Russian George Goncharov. She loved to move and was always creating dances for herself. At the age of 14, her mother brought her to London to give her a chance to develop a dancing career. She started taking lessons with Serafina Astafieva and a little later she went to the Sadler's Wells Ballet School with Vera Volkova. When she danced in England she got her stage name, Margot Fonteyn, which indirectly evolved from her mother's family name, Fontes.

Fonteyn was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Cambridge in 1962. In 1966, she was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the Duke of Devonshire upon his installation as the Chancellor of the University of Manchester. In 1983, Margot was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Santa Clara University.

Career

Fonteyn devoted her entire career to the Royal Ballet. This company was founded by Ninette de Valois in 1928 as the Vic-Wells/Sadler's Wells Ballet, which Fonteyn entered in 1934. De Valois believed in Fonteyn's talent and pushed her through difficult moments. Fonteyn appeared in a number of roles starting in late 1934. Her debut was as a snowflake in The Nutcracker. In late 1935, after Alicia Markova left the company to start her own dance troupe, Fonteyn rose to become the prima ballerina, the dominant female dancer, for the company. Her career soon became linked with choreographer Ashton, who created new roles for her; meanwhile, Michael Somes became her principal partner for the next two decades. By now, she had dropped her birth name. Margaret became the more glamorous "Margot."

The team of Fonteyn and Ashton had its first great success in the Romantic ballet Apparitions in 1936. In 1939, she danced the most notable role of the first half of her career, Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty.

The years of World War II began with a notable adventure. Touring Holland, Fonteyn and the rest of the company were almost caught by the German invasion of that country in the spring of 1940. With German paratroops landing nearby, the dancers fled by bus from Arnhem, where they were giving a performance, to the port of Ijmuiden. There they were lucky enough to find a freighter to take them back across the English Channel.

The remaining years of the conflict found Fonteyn and a shrunken company, lacking most of its male dancers, touring Great Britain. In a time of rationing, fans of the ballet donated their portions of sugar and chocolate to Fonteyn and the other dancers to give them the energy needed for their strenuous performances. Along with other members of the company, Fonteyn traveled to France and Belgium in 1945 to entertain Allied forces. Ashton was able to steal some time from his duties in the Royal Air Force to write a new ballet for her, The Quest. At the close of the war, the young ballerina had her first encounter with serious illness, which she attributed to physical stress and wartime diet.

Her career and the reputation of the Sadler's Wells Company grew in the postwar period. Sadler's Wells was chosen to reopen Covent Garden's Royal Opera in 1946 with a performance of The Sleeping Beauty, which now became its most renowned ballet. Fonteyn, along with Robert Helpmann, who had been her principal partner during the war years, danced the starring role. Her tours took her as far as Prague and Warsaw and the United States and Canada in 1949-1950. During this tour, her performance in The Sleeping Beauty once again entranced audiences. A sign of the times would be her appearance on television when NBC broadcast the performance of The Sleeping Beauty to an American audience in late 1955.

In 1948, the star ballerina hurt a ligament in her ankle, and, in the early 1950s, she found her work increasingly burdened by ill-health. A fortuneteller had once predicted 1952 would be a bad year in her life. Later that year, she contracted diphtheria. One of the disease's frightening symptoms was a temporary paralysis of her feet, and it took her five months to recover completely.

By 1961, the Russian influence in ballet was reasserting itself as the Soviet government permitted leading Russian companies to tour Western Europe. That year, one of the male stars of the Kirov Ballet, the young, rebellious, and talented Rudolf Nureyev, deserted his touring company in Paris and received asylum in the West. Stifled by the artistic conformity of the ballet world in his homeland, he now plunged into the European dance scene.

Now in her early 40s, Fonteyn enjoyed the position of a reigning star on the ballet stage and a model for younger dancers like Antoinette Sibley and Marcia Haydée. Nonetheless, Fonteyn's career seemed in its last years. Her longtime partner Michael Somes was now retired, and Fonteyn herself seemed anxious to cut down on her artistic responsibilities. She was now only a guest artist on the roster of the Royal Ballet.

Margot Fonteyn was at first skeptical about dancing with the mercurial young Russian. But she put aside her concerns about the 20-year difference in their ages, and she and Nureyev received a wildly favorable welcome when they danced together in Giselle in London in early 1962. They repeated their success to equally lavish acclaim in New York in the spring of 1963. For the remainder of the decade, they became the most famous and popular ballet team in the world. Over a period of 17 years, from 1962 to 1979, the two were to dance together on a relatively small number of occasions: fewer than 200. Nonetheless, their partnership dominated the dance stage of the era.

Dancing with Nureyev not only extended Fonteyn's career, but it also brought out new facets of her talent. In this stage of her career, her great role as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet was as much a high point of her work as The Sleeping Beauty had been in earlier years. In all, Fonteyn and Nureyev danced 26 ballets together. These ranged from classic roles to short duets. Their signature ballet was Marguerite and Armand, a retelling of the story of Camille (Alponsine Plessis), which they performed for the first time in London in March 1963.

Fonteyn's career stretched into the 1970s. Her appearances with Nureyev came less frequently as he became involved with experimental dance companies and she engaged in worldwide tours and long affiliation with the Australian Ballet. In a remarkable display of longevity, she continued to perform brief selections in touring companies until she was 60. The noted duo made their last major appearances together at the Royal Ballet in 1976. In 1979, at the close of her career, the two danced together for the last time.

As her professional life came to a close, Fonteyn turned to writing about ballet. She published her autobiography in 1975 and followed it in 1979 with a volume designed to aid parents whose children desired ballet training, A Dancer's World: An Introduction for Parents and Students. At the start of the 1980s, she reached a larger audience than ever before with her six-part BBC-TV series entitled "The Magic of Dance," which she accompanied with a book of the same name.

Fonteyn also received the acclaim of the Royal Ballet where she had danced with matchless distinction. The company put on a gala performance on May 23, 1979, to mark her 60th birthday. The program listed 77 roles that she had performed in her years there. In the early 1980s, she retired to her husband's cattle ranch in Panama. She lived there until her death.

Achievements

• Margot Fonteyn was a star of the Royal Ballet and one of the world's leading ballerinas from the 1930s through the 1970s. She was appointed Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Royal Ballet in 1979, as a gift for her 60th Birthday. The prestigious title was given to only three ballerinas in the 20th century.
  
  Fonteyn was honoured as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951 for her contributions to British ballet. She was also honoured as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956.
  
  In 1974, Fonteyn was awarded the Royal Society of Arts Benjamin Franklin Medal, in recognition of her having built bridges between Britain and the United States through her art. Three years later, she was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S., as the first dancer ever honoured with the award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Swan Lake

    (Once again, ballerina Margot Fonteyn enchants audiences, ...)

    1989
  • Margot Fonteyn: Autobiography

    (Her book is herself. It is, of course, about dancing. Abo...)

    1975
  • A Dancer's World 1978

• movie

  • Margot

    (Taken as an underage mistress, married to a Panamanian Am...)

    2005

Religion

Before her death, Fonteyn converted to Roman Catholicism so that she could have her ashes buried in the same tomb as her husband Roberto Arias.

Politics

As her husband had been appointed an ambassador to the court of St James, Margot attended to the duties of a diplomat's wife. She was criticized for her obvious lack of interest in politics.

In April 1959, Margot Fonteyn was arrested and detained for 24 hours in a Panamanian jail. Her husband had staged a coup against President Ernesto de la Guardia. At the prison, Fonteyn confessed her involvement. The British Foreign Office granted that her statement was confidential. She was released and flew to New York City.

Views

Quotations: "The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous."

"Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike."

"Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?"

"Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable."

"Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time."

"I have never wanted to live to be old, so old I'd run out of friends or money."

"The essential thing about mothers is that one needs to know that they are there, particularly at that age when, paradoxically, one is trying so hard to break away from parental influence."

"Dancing was something to be taken very seriously when engaged in and otherwise put out of mind."

"Life offstage has sometimes been a wilderness of unpredictables in an unchoreographed world."

"The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent."

"I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time."

"The world of dance is a charmed place. Some people like to inhabit it, others to behold it; either way, it is rewarding."

"Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."

"There is no way anything of value can be done without some framework. It might well be that the framework is discarded or the rules opposed; that is not important. What is essential is that they exist so that one knows when one is in opposition to them."

"Dancers are both athletes and artists."

"Jumping for joy is a very basic human reaction, and a child skipping down the street is simply an untrained dancer."

"Generally speaking, we are all happier when we are still striving for achievement than when the prize is in our hands."

"I explained it when I danced it."

"Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life."

"Take your work seriously, but never yourself."

Personality

Despite the fact, that Margot Fonteyn was such a gentle, passive person, there was something tenacious in her. She was methodical. Even more than her talent, it is Margot's courage - the extraordinary capacity she possessed not to blow it, to get it right when it counted.

Physical Characteristics: Fonteyn was the most versatile British ballerina after World War II. Her pale face, black hair, luminous eyes, and engaging smile were her trademarks. With her total musicality, her beautiful physique, her soft style of movement, her gentle loving manner, and her exquisite lines, she created a strong connection with audiences all over the world.

In 1989, Fonteyn was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. By 1990, she had undergone three operations and was bedridden.

Quotes from others about the person

• Meredith Daneman: "How to put something so visual, so potent with a theatrical moment that even film cannot capture it, into plain words? How to explain why it is that when, to a particular strain of music, ordinary mortal steps forward on one leg, raises the other behind her and lifts her arms above her head, the angels hold their breath?"

Interests

• raising cattle

Connections

In 1955, Fonteyn married Dr. Roberto Arias, a Panamanian diplomat to London. Their marriage was initially rocky because of his infidelities. She was arrested in Panama when helping Arias to attempt a coup d'état against the government in 1959. Confidential British government files released in 2010 showed that Fonteyn knew of and had some involvement in the coup attempt. In 1964, a rival Panamanian politician shot Arias, leaving him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. After her retirement, she spent all her time in Panama and was close to her husband and his children from an earlier marriage. She had no pension and had spent all her savings looking after her husband.

Father:

Felix Hookham

(1889 - 1975)

Mother:

Hilda Fontes Hookham

(19 December 1894 - 27 January 1988)

late spouse:

Roberto Arias

(26 October 1918 - 22 November 1989)

Roberto Arias was a Panamanian international lawyer, diplomat and journalist.

colleague:

Rudolf Nureyev

(17 March 1938 - 6 January 1993)

Rudolf Nureyev was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is regarded by some as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation.

Friend:

Nora Kaye

(17 January 1920 - 28 February 1987)

Nora Kaye was an American prima-ballerina known for her ability to perform dramatic roles. Called the Duse of Dance after the acclaimed actress Eleonora Duse, she also worked in films as a choreographer and producer and performed on Broadway.

References

• Margot Fonteyn: A Life Drawing upon extensive research, countless interviews, and exclusive access to never-before-seen letters and diaries - including those of Fonteyn's extraordinary and devoted mother - Daneman presents firsthand remembrances of Fonteyn from a vast array of people who knew her and danced with her during the course of her lengthy career.
  2004
• Fonteyn and Nureyev: The Perfect Partnership An excellent documentary about the legendary couple with large excerpts from Marguerite and Armand, Le Corsaire, Romeo and Juliet. Lots of pictures from the archives, interviews with the two performers, with Dame Ninette de Valois.
  2002
• The Art of Margot Fonteyn A book by Keith Money.
  1976
• My Margot Everyone knew Margot differently. BQ, her mother, knew one Margot. Tito, her husband, knew another. Ludden, her circle's youngest by a large margin, knew yet another side of Margot: hence the title 'My Margot.' Ken shares that Margot - who taught him so much about ballet and life, and with whom he worked to plan ballet's future.
  2014