When he was ten years old, he enrolled in the Sadler's Wells Ballet School, then located in Barons Court, and embarked on a course of training for young people interested in pursuing a career in dance.
As guest choreographer with the Royal Ballet, he gave Dowell a sparkling solo variation in his 1962 staging of the famous pas de six from August Bournonville's Napoli.
Dancing to Mendelssohn's melodic "Nocturne" with Antoinette Sibley as Titania, he took the first steps in forming what became a lasting and legendary partnership, as their slender, blond looks and classical purity found a startling echo in each other.
[3][4][5] In 1965, Dowell was cast in Ashton's elegant and serene Monotones and then as the boisterous Benvolio in Kenneth MacMillan's historic production of Romeo and Juliet.
[8] He undertook more lighthearted roles in La fille mal gardée, Card Game, and Varii Capricci, with which, in 1983, Ashton celebrated his continued partnership with Sibley.
He was also praised for the passion and musicality he brought to leading roles in Ashton's Cinderella, Daphnis and Chloe, and Symphonic Variations, in MacMillan's Song of the Earth and Romeo and Juliet, in Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering and In the Night, and in George Balanchine's Agon.
Trying his hand at costume design, he created stage wear for himself and Sibley in Ashton's Meditation from Thaïs and for dancers in MacMillan's Pavane, in Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Symphony in C, and in Robbins's In the Night.
[11] After his official retirement from the Royal Ballet in 1984, he continued to make occasional dance appearances well into his fifties, creating roles in MacMillan's Winter Dreams in 1991 and in Peter Wright's production of The Nutcracker in 1999.
During his tenure, he succeeded in checking declining technical standards among the soloists and the corps de ballet, and he encouraged and nurtured many world-class talents, among them Darcey Bussell, Jonathan Cope, Sylvie Guillem, and Carlos Acosta.
Conceived, directed, and produced by him, it starred Viviana Durante as the Princess Aurora and featured Dowell himself in a glittering embodiment of evil as the wicked fairy Carabosse.
[16] At age fifty-eight, he had served fifteen years as director of the Royal Ballet, and British theatregoers paid him well-deserved homage for what he had accomplished in that post as well as for his stage career as one of the most admired and beloved dancers in the company's history.
He also appeared as the narrator of Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and for the Joffrey and Royal Ballet productions of Ashton's A Wedding Bouquet, speaking the verses of Gertrude Stein.
[18] In 1973, in recognition of his services to ballet in the United Kingdom, he was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Some time after that affair ended, Dowell met Jay Jolley, a young American who had starred in London Festival Ballet.