ForgotPassword?
Sign Up
Search this Topic:
Forum Jump
Posts: 364
Apr 23 09 4:12 PM
Dancing role: Anne-Marie Duff will portray great ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn on television
Anne-Marie Duff will portray Margot Fonteyn, the prima ballerina assoluta who leapt over the competition to become the queen of British ballet.
The television film will also show how Rudolf Nureyev revitalised Fonteyn's career. When the Russian defected in 1961, she was performing roles that didn't tax her, such as Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty.
But it was decided that the lady of the ballet would tame the lion, and this she did.
Their first performance together was in Giselle - a part she'd first performed 20 years earlier - and it was a huge success.
Their partnership continued, on stage and off, until her retirement in 1979.
Nureyev suggested to friends that the two of them were far more than friends but she, with steely gentility, insisted otherwise.
But the film, being made for BBC4 by director Otto Bathurst (who made last year's superb Criminal Justice TV drama) and screen writer Amanda Coe, will also delve into the dark side of her marriage to Dr Roberto Arias, a shady diplomat with Panamanian credentials and an eye for women who weren't his wife.
When he was shot by a rival Panamanian politician - he was left in a wheelchair - Fonteyn nursed him, although she had to tour often to pay his medical and other bills.
The Fonteyn story is the stuff of legend and drama - and, as someone once noted, there was much heartbreak behind the heroine.
I'm amazed the BBC effort will be just a one-off film on a minor channel and not a classy, main channel mini-series.
Her biographer, Meredith Daneman, wrote of how Fonteyn was born plain Margaret Hookham in Reigate to an English father and a mother who was of Irish-Brazilian parentage.
She had ballet lessons from the age of four. By 14, Ninette de Valois scooped her into the then Sadler's Wells Ballet and soon she was performing major roles.
There were lovers, there were bitter rivalries, but Fonteyn reigned supreme.
Anne-Marie is portraying John Lennon's mother Julia in Sam Taylor Wood's much-anticipated movie Nowhere Boy, and on May 1 she opens in John Crowley's Is Anybody There? opposite a magical Michael Caine and Bill Milner.
Anne-Marie will, obviously, portray Fonteyn but won't be able to do all of the ballet dancing scenes, although it hasn't been fully decided how such scenes will be choreographed.
Just in case, Covent Garden stars, past and present, are being considered to 'dance' the role.
They include the likes of Alina Cojocaru, for instance, or Darcy Bussell - although a balletomane observed, wickedly, that Ms Bussell might be too 'robust' to make us think of Fonteyn's slim, elegant physique.
Edited because of hotlinking
Interact
Share This