Derek Rencher

Derek Rencher (6 June 1932 – 20 December 2014) was a British ballet dancer. A commanding figure among Royal Ballet character dancers for more than four decades, he was probably the most prolific performer in the company's history.

Rencher was born in Birmingham, an industrial, commercial, academic, and cultural center in the West Midlands of England. He grew up in a working-class family, as his father was employed by the toolmakers John Rabone & Sons. An industrious student, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where he pursued a course of study in design and art history. In the early 1950s, at age nineteen, he took a job as an extra during filming of Invitation to the Dance, a Gene Kelly movie intended to educate mainstream audiences about the world of professional dancing. Besides Kelly himself, and such musical theater dancers as Carol Haney and Tommy Rall, the cast included international ballet stars Igor Yousekevitch, Claire Sombert, Tamara Toumanova, Diana Adams, David Paltenghi, and Claude Bessy. Enchanted by the experience, Rencher decided to switch to a dance career and began to take ballet classes with Igor Schwezoff at his private studio and with Jill Gregory and George Goncharov, who taught alongside Vera Volkova at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School.

Within two years, Rencher had been recruited by Ninette de Valois into the Sadler's Wells Ballet, mainly because of his impressive height, trim physique, noble bearing, and remarkably good looks. A quick learner, he made his mark in mid-1950s ballets by rising yourng choeographers Kenneth MacMillan, Alfred Rodrigues, and John Cranko. Over the next forty years, during which the Sadler's Wells Ballet was renamed the Royal Ballet, he would originate roles in ballets by Frederick Ashton, Robert Helpmann, Antony Tudor, and Rudolf Nureyev, as well as appearing in character roles in the company repertory.

Tall and lithe, with a Roman profile, Rencher cut an imposing figure on stage. He made a strong impression in his early appearances at Covent Garden in 1956, dancing in MacMillan's Noctambules and Rodgrigues's The Miraculous Mandarin. He was promoted to soloist in 1957 and to principal dancer in 1969. Almost thirty years later, as a "guest principal character artist," he danced his last season with the company in 1997-98. In his long career with the Royal Ballet, he won acclaim particularly for his powerful stage presence and for his versatility as a mime, as he was able to convey villainy, authority, and comedy with equal effectiveness. He often played a neglected or unlikeable "other man" in romantic triangles alongside the great actress-ballerinas Svetlana Beriosova, Natalia Makarova, and Lynn Seymour, to whom he provided strong but courteous emotional opposition. In 1965, when he danced Paris in Romeo and Juliet, with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, he was so strikingly seductive that one viewer was moved to remark that Juliet had shown singularly poor judgment in her choice of Romeo.

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