Frederick Ashton

Ashton was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the fourth of the five children of George Ashton (1864–1924) and his second wife, Georgiana (1869–1939), née Fulcher.

George Ashton was manager of the Central and South American Cable Company and vice-consul at the British consulate in Guayaquil.

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton (17 September 1904 – 18 August 1988) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer.

He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue.

Determined to be a dancer despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert.

In 1907, the family moved to Lima, Peru, where Ashton attended a Dominican school.

When they returned to Guayaquil in 1914, he attended a school for children of the English colony.

One of his formative influences was serving as an altar boy, which inspired in him a love of ritual, as demonstrated in The Wise Virgins.

Another, still more potent, influence was being taken to see Anna Pavlova dance in 1917.

He was immediately determined that he would become a dancer.

Dancing was not a career acceptable to a conventional English family at that time.

Ashton later recalled, "My father was horrified. You can imagine the middle-class attitude. My mother would say, 'He wants to go on the stage.' She could not bring herself to say 'into the ballet.'" Ashton's father sent him to England in 1919 to Dover College, where he was miserable.

Homosexual, and with an accent that his classmates laughed at, he did not fit in at a minor public school of the early 1920s.

He was not academically inclined, and his father decided that, upon leaving the school in 1921, Ashton should join a commercial company.

He worked for an import–export firm in the City of London, where his ability to speak Spanish and French as well as English was an advantage.

In January 1924, George Ashton committed suicide.

His widow was left financially dependent on her elder sons, who ran a successful business in Guayaquil.

She moved to London to be with Ashton and his younger sister, Edith.

Despite family disapproval (and at first in secret) Ashton pursued his ambition to dance professionally.

He auditioned for Léonide Massine; at the unusually late age of twenty he was accepted as a pupil.

After Massine left London, Ashton was taken on as a student by Marie Rambert.

She encouraged him to try choreographing.

In 1926 Rambert encouraged him to try his hand at choreography, and though he continued to dance professionally, with success, it was as a choreographer that he became famous.

His first attempt was in 1926 for a revue staged by Nigel Playfair and Rambert's husband Ashley Dukes.

The Observer commented on "an engaging little ballet called A Tragedy of Fashion: or The Scarlet Scissors, which Mr. Eugene Goossens has set most suitably to music. Miss Marie Rambert, as an impudently vivacious mannequin, and Mr. Frederick Ashton as a distracted man modist, lead the dancing. It is as chic a trifle as Mr Playfair's modish establishment leads you to expect."

The costumes and scenery were by Sophie Fedorovitch, who continued to work with Ashton for more than twenty years, and became, in his words, "not only my dearest friend but my greatest artistic collaborator and adviser".

Rambert sought to widen her students' horizons, taking them to see London performances by the Diaghilev Ballet.

They had a great influence on Ashton—most particularly Bronislava Nijinska's ballet Les biches.

In 1930 Ashton created an innovative ballet, Capriol Suite, using Peter Warlock's 1926 suite of the same name.

Ashton's ballets of the early 1930s included La péri (1931), The Lady of Shalott (1931), Façade (1931), Foyer de danse (1932) and Les Masques (1933).

Among his best-known works are Façade (1931), Symphonic Variations (1946), Cinderella (1948), La fille mal gardée (1960), Monotones I and II (1965), Enigma Variations (1968) and the feature film ballet The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1970).

Ashton's association with Ninette de Valois, founder of the Vic-Wells Ballet, began in 1931, when he created a comic ballet, Regatta for her.

It received mixed reviews; The Times thought it successful as "a piece of flippant amusement", but The Manchester Guardian considered that "it completely fails ... definitely a poor show".

Nevertheless, Ashton was by now recognised as a choreographer of considerable talent and had gained a national, though not yet international, reputation.

He also contributed to West End revues and musicals, including The Cat and the Fiddle (1932) for C. B. Cochran, and Gay Hussar (1933), in which The Manchester Guardian singled out the "spirited and lovely choreography in the classic manner".

Ashton was chief choreographer to Ninette de Valois, from 1935 until his retirement in 1963, in the company known successively as the Vic-Wells Ballet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Royal Ballet.

He succeeded de Valois as director of the company, serving until his own retirement in 1970.

Ashton is widely credited with the creation of a specifically English genre of ballet.

The music was based on 16th-century French music, and Ashton researched the dances of the earlier era, and created a period piece with "basse danse, pavane, tordion, and bransle—smoothly mixing robust masculine leaps with courtly duets."

The following year Rambert founded the Ballet Club, forerunner of the Ballet Rambert, with Alicia Markova as prima ballerina and Ashton as the main choreographer and one of the leading dancers.