Antony Tudor

Antony Tudor invented the psychological ballet - works about what people feel and cannot say - and made most of the ones that matter before he was thirty-two. He was born William Cook, worked in Smithfield meat market as a clerk, saw Diaghilev's company at nineteen and started training years too late, which is a pattern in this corpus. Marie Rambert took him on at her tiny Mercury Theatre, where he swept floors and took class and choreographed. Jardin aux lilas in 1936 is a woman at her own engagement party, forced to marry a man she does not love, catching sight of the man she does; nothing is narrated, everything is in glances and in the way the stage freezes. Dark Elegies in 1937, to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, is a community after the deaths of its children, danced facing away from the audience. He moved to America in 1939 and made Pillar of Fire for Ballet Theatre in 1942, which made Nora Kaye a star. Then he largely stopped: he made little of consequence for thirty years, taught at Juilliard, and practised Zen Buddhism. He was difficult with dancers to the point of cruelty, by many accounts, in pursuit of what he wanted from them. Jardin aux lilas and Dark Elegies are both still in repertory nearly ninety years on. Hugh Laing, his partner of many years, danced most of the leading male roles he made. He was associate director of American Ballet Theatre late in life and received the Handel Medallion from New York.

• Lived: 1908 CE – 1987 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist