Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev defected at Le Bourget airport in 1961 with six KGB men around him, and changed what a male dancer was expected to be. He was born on a train crossing Siberia, grew up poor in Ufa, started training at seventeen - years late - and got into the Kirov by force of will and talent. On tour in Paris in 1961 he broke the rules constantly, was ordered home, understood what that meant, and asked two French policemen for protection in front of his minders; it was the first defection by a Soviet artist and it was on newsreels within hours. In the West he did two things. He made the male dancer an equal presence rather than a porter: he expanded men's roles in the classics, danced with an attack and a physical charge that audiences had not seen, and worked with a ferocity that his colleagues found exhausting and contagious. And he partnered Margot Fonteyn, nineteen years older and contemplating retirement, for fifteen years; the pairing is the most famous in ballet. He also staged the Petipa classics across Europe from what he remembered, directed the Paris Opera Ballet from 1983 and pushed a generation of young dancers forward there. He bought an island off Positano. He was diagnosed with HIV around 1984, kept dancing and then conducting as his body failed, and died in Paris in 1993. He danced with Fonteyn until she was in her sixties and took a reported eighty-nine curtain calls with her after one Vienna Swan Lake. He appeared on television and in films and was among the first ballet dancers to become a celebrity outside the form. He left his fortune to two foundations. He is buried at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois under a mosaic carpet.

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