Ida Rubinstein

Ida Rubinstein danced Cleopatra and Salome for Diaghilev, was declared insane by her own family for wanting to act, and later commissioned Ravel's Bolero. She was born into an enormously wealthy Jewish banking family in Kharkiv, orphaned young, and raised by relatives in St Petersburg who had her committed to an asylum when she insisted on going on stage; she got out by marrying a cousin and immediately separating. She was not a technically trained dancer, and this mattered less than her presence: very tall, very thin, and able to hold a stage without moving. Fokine choreographed for her, Bakst dressed her, and her Cleopatra in Paris in 1909 and Salome, in which she removed all seven veils, made her notorious across Europe. She then used her fortune to commission rather than to perform under others: Debussy and d'Annunzio's Le Martyre de saint Sebastien in 1911, which the Archbishop of Paris forbade Catholics to attend, and from her own company in the 1920s and 1930s works from Stravinsky, Honegger, Milhaud and Ravel - Bolero was written for her in 1928 and she danced its premiere on a table. She was painted by Serov and Romaine Brooks. She nursed wounded soldiers in the First World War, fled the occupation to England in 1940, and spent her last years in seclusion at Vence. Bolero has become one of the most performed orchestral pieces in the world and Ravel himself described it as a piece for orchestra without music. She was rumoured to keep a panther. She died at Vence in 1960 and asked for a grave marked only with her initials.

• Lived: 1885 CE – 1960 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: artist