Dame Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Royal Ballet, will forever be known as "the Mother of British Ballet". The founder of the Royal Ballet died at her home in Barnes, south-west London, at 8.45 a.m. yesterday at the age of 102.
Despite her stage name, "Madame", as she was always called by the dancers who worked or trained under her, was Irish. When she began her career with Diaghilev's Ballet Russes in 1923, it was the fashion for western dancers to adopt Russian names, but her mother chose the name of Ninette de Valois for her because of her Hugenot ancestry. (An added reason was that Picasso, when he met her in Monte Carlo, described her as "more French than the French".)
She was, however, born Edris Stannus at Baltiboys House in Blessington, Co Wicklow.
When the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet was playing Dublin's Olympia Theatre in December 1955, de Valois re-visited her old home. Up for sale at that time, it reminded her of the last act of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, with much of its land under the still waters of the Poulaphouca Reservoir. In her memoirs, Come Dance With Me, (1957) she wrote: "I feel that here, at the foot of these Wicklow Hills, lies the midnight of the first seven years of my life".
These began inauspiciously. The bonfire lit on the fox covert two years earlier, to announce the birth of her elder sister Thelma was not repeated on June 6th June 1898, when Capt Stannus heard that his hoped-for son had not arrived. He had to wait another two years for the arrival of her brother Trevor, and again for the youngest, Gordon, better known as the photographer Gordon Anthony, thanks to whom we have hundreds of photos of his sister, her ballets and dancers from her companies.
At seven, de Valois saw Leggett Byrne, who had a dance studio in Dublin's Adelaide Road, dance at a party. She insisted on performing a jig herself and then, after seeing her first pantomime in the Gaiety, determined on a career in theatre. She went to live with her grandmother in Walmer, Kent, when the family could no longer afford the upkeep of Baltiboys. She began training in classical ballet. When she saw the great Pavlova dance The Dying Swan, she memorised the choreography, dancing it herself for her school company. Roles in revue, variety and pantomime followed and, by also teaching, she earned the tuition fees to train with the great teacher Enrico Cecchetti. He recommended her to Diaghilev and she spent two years with his Ballets Russes, dancing all over Western Europe, a time she chronicled in her book Invitation to the Ballet (1937).
Then, in 1927, she met W.B. Yeats, who invited her to run a ballet school at the Abbey, where she also choreographed and performed in his Plays for Dancers. Then Lilian Baylis, the formidable and eccentric manager of the Old Vic Theatre in London, invited her to arrange Shakespearian dances and give movement coaching. This led to the founding in 1931 of the Vic-Wells Ballet Company and School, replacing the London Academy of Choreographic Art which de Valois had founded in 1926.
Her encouragement of choreographers such as Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, her development of dancers like Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann, her creation of ballets such as Job (1931), The Rake's Progress (1935) and Checkmate (1937); her introduction to ballet design of artists such as Rex Whistler, Oliver Messel and John Piper, are by now the stuff of legend - as is her invitation to Rudolf Nureyev to join the Royal Ballet.
Kind, sensible and outspoken, de Valois always had absolute integrity. Under her firm guidance, the Vic-Wells became the Sadler's Wells Ballet, developing both its own home-grown stars and a younger sister, the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet. In 1946, it became the Royal Ballet, based at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. A strict disciplinarian, de Valois never demanded more of her dancers than of herself, continuing to dance until 1937, despite pain from an operation in 1935. The latter, however, led to her long and happy marriage to the Irish surgeon who operated on her, the late Dr Arthur Connell.
She retired as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, loaded with honours, including a CBE (1947), Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur (1950) and Dame of the Order of the British Empire (1951). In 1964, she received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society, the first woman to do so since Marie Curie in 1910 and, in 1961, she became the first woman to receive an Erasmus Prize from the Dutch government. In 1980, she received an Irish Community Award and, in 1981, the British Companion of Honour.
She continued directing the Royal Ballet School until 1972, remaining on the Board of Governors of the Royal Ballet and becoming Patron of Irish National Ballet. In recent years, ill-health interrupted her many activities.
In 1998, a garden party was held in the grounds of the Royal Ballet School at White Lodge to celebrate her 100th birthday, though she was not well enough shortly afterwards to attend the production in honour of the occasion by Birmingham Royal Ballet (formerly the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet) of her 1940 wartime ballet The Prospect Before Us.
There are few countries in which de Valois didn't dance, direct, teach or lecture and she will be mourned throughout the world of dance.
Conal Creedon's Video Paradiso column has been held out for space reasons. Brian Boyd's assessment of Shane MacGowan's new book, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, will appear on Tuesday's arts page.
