She and her mother eventually returned to London, where Peggy continued her ballet studies privately. Some of her early childhood was spent in Tientsin, China, where her father had been sent by the British American Tobacco Company, for which he was second-in-command to an engineer, and where Peggy began to study character dancing, which she adored, and Russian ballet. She was born Margaret Evelyn Hookham (nicknamed Peggy), in London, to a father with a lower-middle-class background and a mother of Irish and Brazilian ancestry that included an aristocratic branch. Transcendence, in Fonteyn’s case, began with her stage name, adopted when she joined classes at Sadler’s Wells at the age of 14. Ballet hasn’t produced anyone quite like them in several decades, and in our world now so inhospitable to notions of transcendence, it may never again. The mystique was built on the illusion of being an utterly transparent presence.ĭuring a century of world war and genocide, Fonteyn, Pavlova and Ulanova stirred millions of people into an hour or two of belief that some element of life transcended the material and behavioral. Although all were showcased in virtuoso roles, none of them could be said to be a bravura dancer.

Among 20th-century ballerinas, only Anna Pavlova and Galina Ulanova inspired similar rapture and devotion on such a scale, and for similar reasons: The dedication to the art was relentless and unswerving the dance effects were simple, large and exact and, perhaps most important, each gave the sense that she was opening herself up from the inside-that, in the dancing, one saw the essence of who she was. Audiences around the world (and especially in New York, which she took by storm as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty when the Royal made its debut at the old Met in 1949) associated Fonteyn with eternal youth and a kind of untouchable purity.

Margot fonteyn meredith daneman