Nureyev: The Life » (Reprint)

Julie Kavanagh is the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton, which won the Dance Perspectives Foundation de la Torre Bueno Prize. She trained in ballet before taking up a career in journalism and has been arts editor of Harpers & Queen, a dance critic for The Spectator, and London editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.

Rudolf Nureyev, one of the most iconic dancers of the twentieth century, 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.

In this superb biography, Julie Kavanagh deftly brings us through the professional and personal milestones of Nureyev's life and career: his education at the Kirov school in Leningrad; his controversial defection from the USSR in 1961; his long-time affair with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn; his legendary partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet in London. We see his fiery collaborations with almost all the major living choreographers including Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins, Graham, and Taylor. And we see Nureyev as he reinvigorated the Paris Ballet Opera in the early 1980s before his death from AIDS complications in 1993. Nureyev: The Life is the most intimate, revealing, and dramatic picture we have ever had of this dazzling, complex figure.

The New York Times - Toni Bentley

Julie Kavanagh, a British dance journalist who trained as a dancer and the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton, has written a superbly researched biography of Nureyev, 14 years after his death and nine years after publication of the one other significant biography, by the American writer Diane Solway. Solway's biography was subtitled "His Life." Kavanagh's, with the grandiosity of authorization by the two foundations that bear Nureyev's name, is subtitled "The Life." His life, the life: either way, it was an extraordinary one.