Alexander Grant (dancer)

Alexander Grant (22 February 1925 – 30 September 2011) was a New Zealand ballet dancer, teacher, and company director. After moving to London as a young man, he became known as "the Royal Ballet's most remarkable actor-dancer in its golden period from the 1940s to the 1960s."

Alexander Marshall Grant was born in Wellington, New Zealand, the son of hoteliers, during the prosperous 1920s. He resolved to become a professional dancer at the age of six, when he was taught to perform a simple folk dance, a Ukrainian trepak, and discovered the joy of performing. He began taking dancing lessons when he was seven and, under the tutelage of Kathleen O'Brien and Jean Horne, was an experienced amateur by age fifteen. Inspired by performances of Russian ballet troupes that he saw in Australia, he had already begun to develop the exuberant, energetic, and highly theatrical style that would become his trademark in later life. As a result, he won a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Dance to study in England. But, because of the outbreak of war in Europe, he was forced to remain in New Zealand. He studied at Wellington College from 1939 to 1941 and thereafter performed as a song-and-dance man entertaining troops in the Pacific while continuing his dance training during the wartime years. In 1946, after peace had come to England, Grant was able to go to London and enroll in the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. He arrived in February, when he was twenty-one years old. His time as a student there was brief, however, for he was soon invited to become a founding member of the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, a sister company to the Sadler's Wells Ballet, which had relocated to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

In September 1946, during his first tour with the young company, Grant was transferred to the main company in Covent Garden, today's Royal Ballet. Because of the shortage of male dancers during the war years, he was swiftly promoted to soloist and assigned featured roles in the Sadler's Wells repertory. Frederick Ashton, chief choreographer of the company, noticed him right away and cast him as a music hall hoofer in the Popular Song duet in Façade. Then, in 1947, guest choreographer Léonide Massine chose him for the leading role of the Barber in a revival of his comic ballet Mam'zelle Angot, a lighthearted romp of amorous pursuits. It proved to be the role that made him a star. As a "whimsical, endearing little person in a tow-colored wig," Grant happily "bounced about the stage like a rubber ball," then collapsed in abject despair before winning the heart of the ballerina in the title role, danced by Margot Fonteyn. The next year, 1948, Ashton devised a spectacular hoop dance for him in Les Sirènes, the first of Grant's many created roles in Ashton ballets.

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