Frederick Ashton

Frederick Ashton made the choreographic style that British ballet is recognised by, and he decided to do it after seeing Anna Pavlova dance in Lima when he was thirteen. He was a businessman's son brought up in Peru and Ecuador, sent to school in England and into an office he hated, and he began training seriously in his twenties under Massine and then Marie Rambert, which was late. Bronislava Nijinska he called the greatest influence on his work; he took from her the idea that a step could be phrased like a sentence. Ninette de Valois brought him into the Vic-Wells company in 1935 and he stayed for the rest of his life, making around a hundred ballets and directing the Royal Ballet from 1963 to 1970. The style is lyrical, musically exact and heavy on epaulement - the angling of head and shoulders against the line of the legs - and it was built on Margot Fonteyn, whom he choreographed for over thirty years: Symphonic Variations, Cinderella, Ondine, Daphnis and Chloe, and Marguerite and Armand for Fonteyn and Nureyev. La Fille mal gardee in 1960 is the sunniest thing in the repertory and has never left it. He also danced character roles into old age, notably an Ugly Sister in his own Cinderella. He was knighted in 1962. He worked from music outward and often had a score played to him for weeks before inventing a step. His Enigma Variations sets Elgar s portraits of friends as a ballet of English manners. He appeared in the film of The Tales of Beatrix Potter as Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1970.

• Lived: 1904 CE – 1988 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist