Nureyev: The Life

Here is the definitive biography of one of the most iconic ballet dancers of the twentieth century. Rudolf Nureyev had it all: beauty, genius, charm, passion, and sex appeal. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement, for both men and women, on or off the stage. With Nureyev: The Life, Julie Kavanagh shows how his intense drive and passion for dance propelled Nureyev from a poor Tatar-peasant background to the most sophisticated circles of London, Paris, and New York. His dramatic defection to the West in 1961 created a Cold War crisis and made him an instant celebrity, but this was just the beginning. Nureyev spent the rest of his life breaking barriers: reinventing male technique, «crashing the gates» of modern dance, iconoclastically updating the most hallowed classics, and making dance history by partnering England's prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn — a woman twice his age.