Dame Ninette de Valois OM CH DBE (born Edris Stannus; 6 June 1898 – 8 March 2001) was an Irish-born British[1] dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet.

It was at this time that she changed her name to Ninette de Valois[citation needed] and made her professional debut as a principal dancer in pantomime at the Lyceum Theatre in the West End.

She continued to study ballet with notable teachers, including Edouard Espinosa, Enrico Cecchetti and Nicholas Legat.

[4] She stepped back from regular intense dancing in 1924, after doctors detected damage from a previously undiagnosed case of childhood polio.

She also worked with music specially commissioned from Irish contemporary composers such as Harold R. White's The Faun (April 1928),[12] Arthur Duff's The Drinking Horn and John F. Larchet's Bluebeard (both in July 1933).

She also set about establishing a British repertory, engaging Frederick Ashton as Principal Choreographer and Constant Lambert as musical director in 1935.

[15][16] In 1956, the ballet company and school were granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth II, and formally linked.

De Valois made sure that her company had a constant supply of talent, and in later years it had such stars as Svetlana Beriosova, Antoinette Sibley, Nadia Nerina, Lynn Seymour, and, most sensationally, Rudolf Nureyev.

[citation needed] She also invited choreographers such as Sir Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine to work with her company.

Initially, very few people took the project seriously, but the school did become firmly established under the direction of Molly Lake and Travis Kemp, who in 1954 had undertaken to run it at de Valois' request;[17] this ultimately led to the development of the Turkish State Ballet.

[18] In 1935, at Windsor, she married Dr Arthur Blackall Connell (1902–1987), a physician and surgeon from Wandsworth, who worked as a general practitioner in Barnes, London, where they lived, and later Sunningdale, Berkshire.

[21] De Valois kept her private life very distinct from her professional, making only the briefest of references to her marriage in her autobiographical writings.

In April 1964 she was the subject of This Is Your Life, when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the home of the dancer Frederick Ashton in London.

[22] Among her earliest choreography was a production of the Greek tragedy Oresteia, which opened Terence Gray's Cambridge Festival Theatre in November 1926.

[25] The ballet was produced and choreographed by de Valois, with a commissioned score entitled Job, a Masque for Dancing, written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with orchestrations by Constant Lambert and designs by Gwendolen Raverat.

The libretto for the ballet was written by Geoffrey Keynes and is based on William Blake's engraved edition of the Book of Job from the Hebrew Bible.

[28] Job had its world premiere on 5 July 1931, and was performed for members of the Camargo Society at the Cambridge Theatre, London.

[ζ] Ninette de Valois received the Bronze award presented for services to Ballet from the Irish Catholic Stage Guild in 1949.

[θ] She was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Dance on 19 July 1963[ι] and of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing on 8 March 1964[κ] In 1964 she received the Royal Society of Arts Albert Medal[λ] and in 1974, the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation Erasmus Prize.