14 Facts About Lydia Lopokova

Lydia Lopokova toured with the Ballets Russes in 1910, and rejoined them in 1916 after an interlude in the United States.

Lydia Lopokova largely disappeared from public view after Keynes's death in 1946, and spent her remaining years in Sussex.

Lydia Lopokova's father worked as the chief usher at the Alexandrinsky Theatre; her mother was descended from a Scottish engineer.

Lydia Lopokova trained at the Imperial Ballet School, where she almost immediately became a star pupil.

Lydia Lopokova accepted an American offer of 18,000 francs per month, sixty times more than she had earned in Russia, and after the summer tour left for the United States, where she remained for five years, enjoying tremendous success and legally changing her name to Lopokova in April 1914.

Lydia Lopokova danced regularly with the company, including with her former partner, Vaslav Nijinsky.

Lydia Lopokova toured with the Ballets Russes in America, Europe, South America and later in London.

Lydia Lopokova first came to the attention of Londoners in The Good-humoured Ladies in 1918, and followed this with a raucous performance with Leonide Massine in the Can-Can of La Boutique fantasque.

Lydia Lopokova had an on-off affair with Igor Stravinsky, who composed for the Ballets Russes.

In 1921, Diaghilev staged a lavish production of The Sleeping Beauty in which Lydia Lopokova danced the Lilac Fairy and Princess Aurora.

Besides being involved in the early days of English ballet, Lydia Lopokova appeared on the stage in London and Cambridge from 1928, and was broadcast on the BBC as a presenter and in a number of acting roles; she read "The Red Shoes" over the BBC in 1935.

Lydia Lopokova is represented as Terpsichore, the muse of dancing, in The Awakening of the Muses, a mosaic at the National Gallery, London, laid by Boris Anrep in 1933.

Lydia Lopokova lived with Keynes in London, Cambridge, and Sussex.

Lydia Lopokova died in the Three Ways Nursing Home in Seaford in 1981, at 89.