Annette Page
Dancer with the Royal Ballet who experienced frustration in the star era of Fonteyn and Nureyev
ANNETTE PAGE, who has died aged 84, was one of a golden generation of ballerinas who made the Royal Ballet into a global phenomenon in the mid-20th century. A dark-haired beauty with a pure classical technique, she was performing on the Covent Garden stage when only 15 in walk-on roles, and was marked out as a potential star. However, she found herself squeezed between the Fonteyn phenomenon and the next generation of ballerinas, and her performances in leading roles became frustratingly rare.
Ironically, she strongly resembled Margot Fonteyn in colouring and build, and often danced supporting roles alongside her, particularly in Frederick Ashton’s work. Sometimes she had to dance the Fairy Godmother to the older ballerina’s Cinderella – a situation familiar to other ballerinas who felt obscured by the Fonteynnureyev juggernaut.
When Margot Fonteyn’s husband Tito Arias was shot by a Panamanian political rival as she prepared to perform The Sleeping Beauty with Nureyev, Annette Page took over her performances with the Russian, but she felt increasingly frustrated. “They had an absolute grip on the company,” she said later. “A whole generation was left with the remainders of performances they didn’t do. That meant I only got to dance lead roles once or twice during a run.”
On a 1966 tour, Annette Page complained to the Royal Ballet’s director, Frederick Ashton, about the professional imbalances building up in the company. He replied: “I admire your spirit in coming to me but the only reason we’ve got this tour booked at all is because of Fonteyn and Nureyev.”
On another occasion her enterprising Mancunian spirit won her opportunities. After getting a dusty answer from Ninette de Valois when she asked to dance the effervescent leading role in Ashton’s new full-length ballet, La Fille mal
gardée, she found herself cast in it a few days later.
Annette Page also had an unusual gift for comedy, and as a classicist she was “a dancer of exceptional purity and beauty”, according to Ballet Annual 1958. But fate deprived her of what might have been major international recognition as a dramatic ballerina in 1965 when an ankle injury prevented her taking the second night of Kenneth Macmillan’s new Romeo and Juliet, following its premiere with Fonteyn and Nureyev dancing the title roles.
Annette Page was born in Manchester on 18 December 1932, the elder of two daughters of Margaret and James Lees Page, a bank clerk. Her parents were keen amateur singers and she grew up musical, starting dance lessons locally during the war. When the Sadler’s Wells Ballet toured to Manchester, Moira Shearer and other dancers lodged with her teacher, and via Shearer she won a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells School.
The 11-year-old Annette took the bus and Tube each day from her north London lodgings to the school, where she quickly stood out. Being small, she took on animal roles, and she was hired into the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. Ninette de Valois transferred her to the Covent Garden-based Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet in 1955.
At first Annette Page had a bounty of opportunities, including good roles in new Kenneth Macmillan 1950s ballets, Danses concertantes and Agon, and classical ballerina roles in Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Firebird, touring the world from America to Japan. But she was unlucky to be up against a new generation of star ballerinas such as Lynn Seymour, Antoinette Sibley and Svetlana Beriosova. Often she had to step in for injured colleagues in order to get her chances.
Annette Page danced with Nureyev twice in The Sleeping Beauty, replacing Fonteyn, and often with Christopher Gable and Donald Macleary, but her favoured partner would become her husband, Ronald Hynd, with whom she performed Swan Lake and The Firebird. They married in 1957, and for their honeymoon roared off on a Vespa scooter to the Salzburg Festival to hear Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-dieskau in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
Annette Page was identified with the refined expressiveness of Ashton ballets such as Symphonic Variations and Scènes de ballet and was also naturally suited to Ashton’s two finest heroine roles, Cinderella and Lise in La Fille mal gardée. Her farewell performance was as Lise.
Annette Page retired from the stage aged 34, and gave birth to a daughter in 1968. She then teamed up with her husband, Ronald Hynd, by now increasingly renowned as a choreographer. From 1973 to 1976 she became ballet mistress at the Bavarian State Ballet when he was appointed artistic director, and she assisted him until her death.
Annette Page is survived by her husband and their daughter.
Annette Page, born December 18 1932, died December 4 2017