15 Facts About Alexis Rassine

Alexis Rassine was a South African ballet dancer who enjoyed his greatest success with the Sadler's Wells Ballet in England in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Alexis Rassine studied with Vera Volkova at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School.

In late 1940, a group of Polish refugees formed the Anglo-Polish Ballet, specializing in Polish folk dances, and Alexis Rassine was invited to join.

Alexis Rassine soon became the leading classical dancer of the company, performing in Michel Fokine's Les Sylphides and Le Spectre de la Rose with Natalia Rossowska.

When Ninette de Valois, director of the Sadler's Wells Ballet, came looking for male dancers to replace losses in her war-ravaged company, she was favorably impressed with Alexis Rassine but chose another dancer instead, the diminutive Gordon Hamilton, an Australian character dancer and mime.

In 1942, Alexis Rassine joined the Sadler's Wells Ballet, where he would remain until 1955.

Alexis Rassine was particularly noted for dancing the technically demanding role of the Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty.

Alexis Rassine danced leading roles in many audience favorites: Harlequin in Fokine's Carnaval, Vestris in de Valois's The Prospect before Us, the Snob in Leonide Massine's La Boutique fantasque, and the Blue Boy in Frederick Ashton's Les Patineurs.

Alexis Rassine's engaging personality made him well suited to lighthearted roles, but he was adept at characterization in dramatic works.

Alexis Rassine returned to Cape Town first in 1947, when he was invited to produce and dance in act two of Giselle for the South African National Ballet, then under the direction of Cecily Robinson, with whom he had danced as a student in his youth.

Alexis Rassine subsequently formed an important partnership with his close friend Nadia Nerina, a South African dancer who had become prima ballerina at the Sadler's Wells Ballet.

Alexis Rassine was gradually relegated to second or third casts or was left out of new works altogether.

Alexis Rassine left the company in search of new opportunities, and he found them for a time as a guest with Walter Gore's London Ballet and companies abroad.

Early in his career in England, Alexis Rassine formed a deep friendship with John Lehmann, poet and man of letters, recognized today as one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century.

At the height of his success, in the mid-1940s, Alexis Rassine decided to have an operation to change the shape of his aquiline nose, which to some extent diminished his outgoing personality.