A virtuoso dancer who greatly increased popular interest in the ballet, Rudolf Nureyev was born near Irkutsk, of Tatar origin. A professional performer from the age of 15, Nureyev entered the Leningrad Ballet School in 1955, where his rebellious behaviour, including refusal to join the Komsomol Communist youth organisation, was overlooked because of his outstanding talent.In 1958, Nureyev left the school to become soloist with the Kirov (now Mariinsky) Ballet in Leningrad (St Petersburg). In 1961, when the Kirov was on tour in Paris, Nureyev escaped Soviet security men at the airport and requested asylum in France. It emerged that his reasons for defection were as much aesthetic as political: Soviet ballet was too rigidly organised to allow him to perform as often or in as wide a variety of roles as he would have wished.
In the West, Nureyev began his career with the Marquis de Cuevas' ballet and made his American debut in 1962, but real recognition came when he joined the London Royal Ballet as permanent guest artist later that year. Thus began Nureyev's long association with Dame Margot Fonteyn, the pre-eminent ballerina in the West.
This was perhaps the most famous partnership in the history of ballet. With Fonteyn, Nureyev was able to reinterpret the role of Albrecht in Giselle, Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake and Armand in Marguerite and Armand. Nureyev also danced with many companies throughout the world, including the American Ballet Theatre and the Martha Graham Company. As a choreographer, he revised Swan Lake (1964), Prokoviev's Romeo and Juliet (1977) and Manfred (1979).
Nureyev also had a keen interest in modern repertoires, performing in works choreographed by Martha Graham (Lucifer, 1975), Murray Louis and Paul Taylor. He became an Austrian citizen in 1982, but his spiritual home was Paris, where he was artistic director of the Opéra Ballet from 1983-89. Nureyev died in 1993, and is buried in the Russian cemetery at Ste-Genevieve-des-Bois, south of the capital.
