Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 22, 1991 TAG: 9102220697
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-8 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PANAMA CITY, PANAMA LENGTH: Medium
Dame Margot, a miracle of timelessness in the mercurial world of ballet, died of cancer in a Panama City hospital Thursday after eight months of hospitalization in Houston and the Panamanian capital.
She was to be buried today in Panama, her adopted country and the homeland of her late husband. Funeral services were to be held at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Panama City, followed by burial at Gardens of Peace cemetery.
Fellow artists remembered her for her personality, as well as the dancing that once brought her 48 curtain calls in her 1949 performance of "The Sleeping Beauty."
"She will be remembered as the greatest dancer ever," said Nureyev, the celebrated Russian dancer. "She will be remembered as the kindest person with great concern for everyone. I was just very happy to know her."
Nureyev was visibly shaken when told of her death on arrival in Chicago, where he was performing.
In New York, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who danced with Dame Margot several times, said she "was a lady wonderfully down to earth and yet with an astonishing spiritual grace."
Maina Gielgud, the artistic director of the Australian Ballet who once toured with Dame Margot, said, "She is the one who has done more to make dance a household name in her own time."
Queen Elizabeth II gave her the title of dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in 1956.
Born Peggy Hookham in Reigate, Surrey, Britain, she spent much of her childhood in China with her family.
Discovered in the early 1930s by Dame Ninette de Valois, she joined the Vic-Wells Ballet, now the Royal Ballet, at 14. After two years, she was dancing lead roles and soon became prima ballerina of the company.
In 1962, she teamed up with Nureyev, launching a partnership with the Russian defector 20 years her junior. The pair starred in the Royal Ballet's premiere of "Romeo and Juliet" in 1965.
The ballet helped set the stage for Fonteyn-Nureyev fever: The pair became the darlings of dance and, in America, helped popularize ballet. Nureyev was young and virile, his youth inspiring Fonteyn to a new vibrancy.
Dame Margot was nearing 50 when in 1969, she and Nureyev premiered Roland Petit's "Pelleas and Melisande," set to a symphonic poem by Arnold Schoenberg.
As a dancer, Dame Margot had a body that was almost inconceivably supple and ruled by precision. Her turn-out was perfect; her line, clean and strong.
Her looks added to the drama: dark emerald eyes and ebony hair set against a pale and youthful face.
She met Roberto Arias, son of a president of Panama, in Cambridge, England, in 1937. They married in 1955.
In 1964, an assassination attempt while he was running for office left him paralyzed.
She spent the years after her 1979 retirement in helping Arias manage his cattle ranch near El Higo, Panama, 60 miles southwest of Panama City.
In her spare time, she advised the National Ballet Company of Panama.
"I do not feel that there has been a drastic change in my life," she said of the move to Panama. "I am happy here. This is home. I do not really miss the past. I do not wish I were back there."
While in Houston, Dame Margot had expressed the wish to return to Panama to die and be buried next to her husband, said Louis Martins, a friend of the dancer and an adviser to President Guillermo Endara.
The couple had no children, but Arias had three children by a previous marriage and several grandchildren.
Keywords:
NEWS OBIT
by CNB