Margot Fonteyn

Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) was ballet’s first true superstar. She was already the beloved figurehead of Britain’s Royal Ballet when the company first visited the United States in 1949. Younger ballerinas languishing in Fonteyn’s shadow, such as Moira Shearer, star of the 1948 hit movie “The Red Shoes,” wondered when she would retire. Instead, Fonteyn’s New York triumph – cover stories in both Time and Newsweek magazines – rocketed her into the stratosphere. Fonteyn became an international celebrity and cult figure.

Her puzzling 1955 marriage to the notoriously philandering Panamanian diplomat Tito Arias only fuelled the flames. Then in 1962 Nureyev arrived in London, forging a new partnership with the rejuvenated Fonteyn that kept her dancing for a further 18 years. Suggestions of an offstage romance between this oddly matched pair, bolstered by Frederick Ashton’s emotionally overwrought 1963 creation for them, Marguerite and Armand, rekindled prurient public curiosity. Then, a year later, Tito Arias was rendered a quadriplegic by a would-be assassin‘s bullet and Fonteyn adopted the role of dutiful, care-giving martyr wife.

Meredith Daneman’s engrossing new biography explains ...