Margot Fonteyn - born plain Peggy Hookham - was dreamed into existence by the architects of British ballet: Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert. Carried to fame on a wave of wartime patriotism, Margot's sense of duty rather than ambition propelled her forward. Yet her gifts were such that her pre-eminence would come to eclipse the careers of subsequent generations.Ballet is a fairytale world; if Margot, like the pure and poetic heroine of Swan Lake, was a natural Odette, she would also have to contend with virtue's raw shadow-side in the guise of Constant Lambert, Roberto Arias and Rudolph Nureyev - the men who, like Von Rothbart, were to take possession of her heart.

Autorentext

Meredith Daneman, a graduate of London’s Royal Ballet School and former member of the Australian Ballet Company, is the author of four novels: The Favourite, A Chance To Sit Down, Francie and the Boys, and The Groundling, as well as the biography Margot Fonteyn: A Life.

Klappentext

Margot Fonteyn began life on the 18th of May, 1919 in Reigate, Surrey, as plain Peggy Hookham. She ended it on the 21st of February, 1991, as Prima Ballerina Assoluta, Dame of the British Empire and the most legendary dancer since Pavlova. Meredith Daneman, with her own extensive background in ballet, tells Fonteyn's story in vivid prose with insight and sensitivity.

Drawing upon extensive research, countless interviews, and exclusive access to never-before-seen letters and diaries-including those of Fonteyn's extraordinary and devoted mother-Daneman presents firsthand remembrances of Fonteyn from a vast array of people who knew her and danced with her during the course of her lengthy career. Margot Fonteyn contains revelations not found in any other account of the ballerina, from insights into Fonteyn's private world (especially regarding her relationship with her mother, the "Black Queen") to her feelings about her fellow dancers and, of course, the men in her life-including choreographer Frederick Ashton, her husband Roberto Arias, and her long-time dance partner and rumored lover Nureyev.

Zusammenfassung
This is the biography of the much-loved dancer, Margot Fonteyn, generally considered to be the best British ballerina of her generation. She was one of the rare artists whose name means as much to the ordinary man and woman as to devotees of their particular art.