Ninette de Valois

Ninette de Valois founded the company that became the Royal Ballet, the school that feeds it and the touring company behind it, and lived to a hundred and two. She was born Edris Stannus in County Wicklow, took a French stage name because English dancers were then thought unemployable, danced in pantomime and music hall, and joined Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1923, where she watched how a company was built. She left in 1926 with a plan: open a school, attach it to a theatre, and grow a national ballet out of it. Lilian Baylis gave her a job teaching movement to actors at the Old Vic, and out of that came the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1931, then Sadler's Wells, then the Royal Ballet by charter in 1956. She recruited Ashton to make the repertory and Constant Lambert to run the music, brought in Karsavina and other Russians to teach what they remembered, and had the nineteenth-century classics staged properly from Nicholas Sergeyev's notation - which is why The Sleeping Beauty and Giselle survive in the form they do. She choreographed too, and The Rake's Progress and Checkmate are still danced. She reopened the Royal Opera House in 1946 with Sleeping Beauty, a fortnight after the war ended it. She directed until 1963 and went on teaching for decades after. She published three volumes of memoirs and wrote poetry into her nineties. Her nickname in the company was Madam and nobody used anything else. The Royal Ballet School moved to White Lodge in Richmond Park in 1955 under her direction.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 2001 CE
• Nationality: Irish
• Roles: artist