She knows this world intimately, and she knows how to capture it in words.įor Margot-and Daneman rightly makes it clear from the start that she can be referred to no other way-dance was paramount. Daneman, besides writing four novels, studied at the Royal Ballet School in London and danced with the Australian Ballet.
Dancers live in their bodies, not their heads, and their offstage lives are often less substantive than their ephemeral onstage existences. Meredith Daneman's biography, "Margot Fonteyn," is a marvel, fully worthy in every way of its almost royal subject, and all the more a marvel because dance and dancers are so hard to write about. " 'She is not just the best 53-year-old ballerina in the business,' " critic Clive Barnes wrote at the time, " 'she is still, without qualification, the greatest ballerina in the world.' " Then in her 50s, she was still dancing Aurora in "The Sleeping Beauty" and convincing everyone-from her famous running entrance, through the impossibly long balances of the Rose Adagio, through to the final, heart-stopping fish-dives at the end-that she was 16 years old. She was almost a mythological creature, but at New York's Metropolitan Opera House 30 years ago, audiences, myself included, used to sing a rousing "Happy Birthday" to her each May. How can words or even pictures capture what it was like to see Margot Fonteyn dance? The beauty of her artistry went beyond ordinary human limits, and yet her humanity shone through so radiantly that she allowed you to feel you knew her.
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