Margot Fonteyn: The truth behind the ballet legend

It was the evening of Monday, August 23, 1954, and a young student from the Royal Ballet School broke all the Covent Garden Opera House rules to hide backstage behind the scenery.

It was the opening performance of The Firebird, an iconic 1910 ballet made famous by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. With the British dance fraternity packed into the theatre’s crimson and gilt splendour, Margot Fonteyn, the company’s star, was dancing the title role.

The theatre held its breath for Stravinsky’s short overture then there was a heart-stopping swish as the gold-encrusted curtains flew skywards and Fonteyn was on. She may not have been known for the power of her jump but Fonteyn barely touched the floor as she flew like an exotic phoenix across the stage under a flaming orange spotlight.

Then she did it all over again, oblivious of me, an intruder behind a curtain only inches away.

The impact and magic of her stage presence has stayed with me ever since but that hypnotic power is missing in Margot, screened on BBC4 tomorrow, and the third and final episode in the Women We Loved series (the other

two featuring children’s author Enid Blyton and Rochdale-born singer Gracie Fields).

Former Shameless star Anne-Marie Duff gives a beautifully balanced portrayal of the offstage Margot Fonteyn but it wasn’t her charm that made her the first global dance star. It was her unique vulnerability, the full-blooded and unquestioning desire to share that millions found irresistible during her 50-year career.

Duff is occasionally required to don a tutu and a forlorn expression to illustrate her character’s performance values. And despite images in the television film of Margot and her on/off partner Rudolf Nureyev, played by Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, rolling like thunder between the sheets, there was little doubt within the dance world about his true sexual preferences.

During the Nureyev years, a period of revolution that changed the face of British ballet forever, no one could miss the Russian dancer’s insatiable appetite for boys. Fonteyn and Nureyev first danced together in Giselle at the Royal Opera House in 1962, a sensational pairing when 43-year-old Fonteyn was nearly two decades older than Nureyev, 22. Yet although the chemistry between them fi red the public’s imagination, the profession knew that Nureyev was passionately in love with Danish dancer Erik Bruhn.

But abstinence was a foreign concept to Nureyev and his hunger for male companionship was catered for by obliging friends.

The founding force of the Royal Ballet, Ninette de Valois, an Irish ballistic missile, was born Edris Stannus in County Wicklow in 1898. She became a dancer who boasted of performing the Dying Swan solo “at the end of every pier in Britain”.

In Margot, scriptwriter Amanda Coe creates a smiling, obliging office manager, played by Lindsay Duncan, but De Valois, or Madame as she was universally called, was about as obliging as Genghis Khan. And it worked. “I was terrified of her in the early days,” says ballet legend Dame Beryl Grey, who joined the then Vic-Wells Ballet in 1941 aged 14.

However she adds: “Madame was a perfectionist and a great leader.” Like Genghis, De Valois carved out her empire, today consisting of two world-class Royal Ballet companies and two schools attached by a glass

walkway, dubbed the Bridge of Aspiration, to the state-of-the art rehearsal and performing facilities in the Opera House.

Dame Beryl remembers asking De Valois: “Did you plan it or did it all just fall into place?” “No,” she replied, “I planned it all.” Madame died aged 102 in 2001. The television programme’s practice studio shots are, with the exception of Nureyev’s occasional tantrums, disturbingly easygoing.

In fact, though many battled to gain a place in the school, like the SAS endurance tests, few survived the almost brutal regime that trickled down from the driven boss.

By today's hands-off standards when dealing with children, our teachers then were openly sadistic and dressing-room snobbery revolved around the size of your father’s bank account. Every morning limousines littered the kerb on west London’s Talgarth Road as the scions of the world’s wealthy arrived for their daily scourging.

Unhappy children opting for a less stressful career were replaced by other eager cheque books, which resulted in the school’s considerable annual turnover. I turned up with a scholarship, a broad Mancunian brogue and Brylcreem.

I didn’t stand a chance. In the classroom, public humiliation took the place of the constructive criticism I grew up

with in Manchester, sarcasm replaced praise and the older boys made the showers a no-go area. I was living on less than a pound a day and, in the interests of De Valois’s corporate image, all dance gear had to be purchased through the school.

A pair of tights cost £1 10s, then there were vests, socks and shoes. No wonder my weight loss was spectacular. However, for South African-born Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s current director, joining the company in 1958 was inspirational, not inhuman; confidence-building, not ego-busting.

“There was such a buzz of energy,” she remembers. “In those days we all worked in one big studio, ballerinas, soloists and first-year corps de ballet. Everybody did the same class in the morning and stayed together for the rest of the day. We were all ages, we were all ‘the company’.”

Fonteyn lost her fortune and, ultimately, her freedom when she married Panamanian diplomat Roberto “Tito” de Arias in 1955. A confirmed womaniser, Tito survived a 1964 assassination attempt and, although she was on the point of divorcing him, Fonteyn devoted the last years of her life to nursing her paraplegic husband.

Losing everything, they scratched a living on a remote farm. She attended to his personal hygiene, turned him to avoid bedsores and fed the invalid a teaspoonful at a time. She had no money and was deeply shamed by the collection boxes passed round London’s West End dressing rooms.

Tito predeceased her in 1989. Fonteyn died of cancer two years later in 1991, aged 72. Monica Mason tries to pinpoint why such an essentially English personality succeeded in such a flamboyant occupation.

“Margot knew from an early age that a lot was expected of her and she developed the strength never to let anyone down. Margot’s only obsession was to dance but a dancer’s life never changes. It’s always hard work, you must accept discipline and dance when you’re exhausted. No dancer would want it any other way.”

Amen to that and thank God for Margot Fonteyn.

● Margot, 9pm, BBC4, Monday.