In today’s links, you will find reference to Lucette Aldous is honoured in Australia:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...5013570,00.html

I well remember this dancer “petite” in height (only 5 feet tall) but huge in technical ability and personality. She is probably best known to many today through the film of Don Q made with Nureyev. As good fun as it is, both were past their own technical best by the time it was made. Lucette’s range with Rambert Ballet Company went from Giselle, La Sylphide, to a full length Don Quixote. Famously this diminutive dancer performed the role of the Lilac Fairy for a TV production starring Dame Margot Fonteyn. Miss Aldous moved to the Royal Ballet Touring Company but moved to the Royal Ballet Touring Company where she danced the classics and was Titania to Nureyev’s Oberon debut in Ashton’s “The Dream.” I personally admired her immensely in “Coppelia” and “La Fille mal Gardee”. From the Royal she went to a third successful step in her career when she joined the London Festival Ballet where she danced a wide range of roles. From there she joined the Australian ballet encouraged by Sir Robert Helpmann she starred with Rudolf Nureyev in “Don Quixote” of which they gave 56 performances in a tour of America, which must be some kind of record. It was on this tour that her husband Alan Alder proposed to her and they married in 1972 and have a daughter called Floer.
I wondered if any ballettalkers have memories of the “Don Quixote” tour mentioned above.

i would love to hear those recollections! i never did see her on stage, and besides the don quixote film, recall her only in the turning point in a very tiny fragment of the black swan pas de deux, dancing with fernando bujones, if my memory serves me.

I did see them on that tour. I was a child at the time, and since my father had (very briefly) known Nureyev shortly after his defection when he was in Tokyo, I was able to go backstage and meet both of them. I remember being surprised at how roughh the stage floor looked and also at how small the dancers were.

-d-