The most valuable source was an unpublished memoir by Fonteyn's ambitious, dedicated mother, who was known in their circle as BQ this was short for Black Queen, a character in Checkmate, choreographed by Ninette de Valois, the Irish taskmistress who created British ballet and shaped Fonteyn's career. She gratefully acknowledges information from Fonteyn's English relatives and Panamanian in-laws. They include Fonteyn's doctors and some of her lovers and their wives and widows. Sydney-born Daneman, who won a scholarship to London's Royal Ballet School and danced with the Australian Ballet in its early days, has read widely and interviewed a huge range of sources. And this is not just because it uncovers a busy sex life.ĭaneman brings impressive skills and a useful background to her account of a complex woman who took on leading roles as a child, kept dancing until she was 60 and, except for the Russians Pavlova and Ulanova, has no rivals for the title of the 20th century's greatest ballerina. Although the result at times seems to verge on the scandalous, its greater significance is to make Fonteyn even more appealing than she was at the height of her celebrity. Daneman's great achievement is to make old stuff look fresh while providing startling new information. The broad outlines of the lives of this pair - who bullied and charmed each other into discovering in themselves theatrical qualities they did not know they possessed - will be familiar to many potential readers of this biography.

It began in 1962, when she was 42 and apparently on the downward slope of a brilliant career and he was 23 and just beginning a wild journey into international fame and notoriety. And now that the protagonists and many of those close to them have died, without letting us into the secret, Daneman seems better equipped than anyone to provide definitive information about the 29-year relationship between the part-Brazilian Dame of the British Empire and the Tartar defector from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet.

Meredith daneman