Rudolph Hametovich Nureyev
3-17-1938 to 1-6-1993, age 54 years

Rudik (Rudolph) Hametovich Nureyev was born on March 17, 1938 near Irkutsk, Siberian USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express train as his mother made the six-day trip from her Ural Village to join her husband, a soldier and devoted Communist, in Russia's Far East. Rudolph was of Tatar descent, and was reared during the Stalinist purges. He lived in Moscow from 1938 to 1941, in the Bashkir Republic until 1943, and then in Ufa, until 1955. He had to struggle against his father's wishes to dance, sneaking off to class. He studied dance and apprenticed with the Ufa Ballet. He pushed his way into the Leningrad Choreographic Institute at the relatively old age of 17. He was an outstanding but rebellious student under Alexander Pushkin at the Leningrad Ballet School from 1955 to 1958, when he bypassed the corps de ballet and graduated directly to solo roles with the Kirov Ballet. He turned down contracts offered by the Bolshoi and the Stanislavsky-Nemirovich-Danchenko companies. He toured extensively with the Kirov for three years.

The Communist Party and the KGB didn't trust Nureyev's political loyalty, and he angered them by associating too freely with Westerners while on tour. He was at the Le Bourget airport in Paris with the Kirov on June 17, 1961, ready to fly with them to London, when he learned that he was being sent back to Russia. He was 23.

According to Diane Solway’s 1998 biography "Nureyev: His Life," and based on new information from declassified KGB reports, Nureyev was flanked by KGB agents, and made an urgent appeal for help to a Paris friend, Pierre Lacotte. Lacotte called another friend, Clara Saint, who rushed to the airport. Posing as an adoring girlfriend, she convinced the KGB agents to let her say goodbye to Nureyev. While kissing his cheeks, she whispered plans into his ear. Then she rushed away and got the French airport police, telling them that a famous Russian dancer wanted to stay in France. The police agreed to protect him if he could get away from the KGB and into their custody. They accompanied Saint into the airport bar where the KGB was guarding him. She approached him one last time, whispering that he needed to get to the police across the room.

"Five minutes later," writes Solway, "Rudolf bolted from his chair to the bar, a distance of just a few yards. 'I want to stay in France,' he cried in English." The KGB agents lunged for him, but the police, as promised, protected him.

It was this spectacular event that first made Nureyev famous, but his continuing stardom owed much more to his passionate, virile dancing. That defection made it easier for others to leave Russia, including Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1962 the soviets charged Nureyev in absentia with high treason and sentenced him to seven years in jail. As Mikhail Gorbachev eased the restrictions on soviet exiles in 1989, Nureyev was allowed back to visit his ailing mother - who was never allowed to emigrate despite Rudolph's constant efforts - and to perform in St. Petersburg. The treason charge was eventually rescinded.


In the months following his defection he performed in Paris, New York City, London, and Chicago, but he reached a turning point in 1962 when he partnered the London Royal Ballet's acclaimed ballerina Margot Fonteyn in Giselle at the Govent Garden. She was 19 years his senior. In that year he wrote his autobiography. He was the principal guest artist with the Royal Ballet until 1977. In 1964, following the discovery of a cryptic note behind a wall plaque in a California hotel, he became the subject of an FBI Espionage investigation. (See http:// www.bigbrotherswatching.com /rudolph_nureyev.html).

He revised and staged several ballets, including the Marius Petipa version of Don Quixote (1966). He danced in a number of works by modern-dance choreographers including Glen Tetley and Paul Taylor. He frequently appeared on television, was the star and subject of a feature-length film, and had a limited-run Broadway show (1974&emdash;75). In 1977 he made a debut as a speaking actor, portraying Rudolph Valentino directed by Ken Russell..

Although he became an Austrian citizen in 1982, he lived mainly in Paris, where from 1983 he was director and principal choreographer of the Paris Opera Ballet. His major roles include the leads in La Bayadère, Les Sylphides, Giselle, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, Le Corsaire, Raymonda, and Sleeping Beauty. In 1989 he returned to the Soviet Union to visit his invalid mother, and he danced there for the first time since his defection. Rudolf Nureyev was an accomplished musician, a fact which helps explain the perfection of his dancing, and his ambition to conduct all his own ballets.from the orchestra pit. C. Barnes wrote a biography of his life in 1982. Rudolph appeared in a second Hollywood film in 1983, "Exposed," directed by James Tobak.


He was admired by Jackie Onassis, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful, Andy Warhol and Madonna. Soviet Prime Minister Leonid Brezhnev personally tried to thwart his career. "He was really a flash point of the Cold War. He's an icon of the sexual revolution; he's an icon on the '60s; he's representative of the whole popularization of high culture, of the cult of celebrity and of the AIDS epidemic," says Diane Solway. Despite many flaws, her book is fascinating both as a portrait of the arrogant, lusty, obsessive dance genius and as a record of the times he exemplified. Nureyev consorted with royalty and with gay hustlers. He was defiant of teachers, directors and choreographers, yet his discipline in the studio was unparalleled. Solway shows the contradictions in his character--between neediness and chilling indifference, between loyalty and promiscuity, between cruelty and generosity--most forcefully in her account of Nureyev's tumultuous affair with Erik Bruhn. Bruhn, a beautiful blond Danish ballet star 10 years older than Nureyev, was "the Apollo to his Dionysus," and he remained the love of Nureyev's life even after their relationship ended.

Michel Canesi was his personal friend and physician, with whom he appeared to have had an intimate and loving relationship. According to an interview with Canesi in the Magazine Figaro, Rudolph was, in 1984, like many gay men, filled with anxiety over the new disease, "AIDS". Everyone he knew in the United States was talking about it. And so, after discussing it with Canesi, he went to the SalpÕtriÀre hospital for an HIV-antibody test. The result was positive, and a rumor immediately went around Paris that Nureyev had AIDS. However, Nureyev was in good health at the time, and chose to deny the diagnosis. A real decline in Nureyev's health began in the summer of 1991, and in the spring of 1992 he entered into the final phase of his illness. Despite being very ill, Nureyev miraculously continued to work, and achieved a personal triumph conducting Romeo and Juliet at the Metropolitan Opera. Canesi suggested various treatments to Nureyev, which he rejected as being too expensive. The two of them had a tiff, and Nureyev said, in English, "No. I don't need you any more!" Three days later he called back to apologize. Canesi stated, "His disposition became milder with illness, and he became more and more touching. He was Petrushka, the disjointed puppet, broken and miserable."


Nureyev made his last public appearance on October 8, 1992, taking a bow at the Paris premiere of his new production of La Bayadere. He received a 10-minute standing ovation from the audience. He had to be helped onto the stage by two dancers, and remained seated as he was decorated as a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Education. Though weak, tired and emaciated, he was very happy, and said, in English, "It's good to be alive." Nureyev died on January 6,1993, in Paris, France. He was buried in the tiny Russian cemetery at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, 15 miles south of the city.

Controversy broke out immediately following the announcement of Rudolf Nureyev's death in Paris on 6 January 1993. Canesi stated to the media that Nureyev had died of "a cardiac complication, following a grievous illness", and refused to elaborate further: "Following Mr. Nureyev's wishes, I can't say any more." However, many of Nureyev's friends said that he had "AIDS".

The loss of the greatest ballet star, since Pavlova and Nijinsky early in the century, deeply affected members of the dance community in New York, who defiantly added Nureyev's name to the roster of AIDS deaths. Some people with "AIDS" expressed anger; novelist Paul Monette blurted out, "I consider him a coward; I don't care how great a dancer he was." One reason why Nureyev had not gone public with his "AIDS" diagnosis was quite simple: a number of countries, including the United States, refused entry to individuals known to be HIV-positive.

He left $7 million to the Rudolph Nureyev Dance Foundation shortly before his death. His relatives tried to block the gift on the grounds that he was not sane, but a federal judge found the gift was valid.

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