How Nureyev Played the Fame Game ; a New Biography Reveals the Narcissistic Russian Ballet Legend to Be the Prototype Modern Celebrity

Evening Standard - London › September 26, 2007

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Summary

EVERYTHING he did was designed for the public eye. Whether he was dancing, defecting, duetting with Margot Fonteyn, conducting orchestras when he could dance no more, cruising gay bars and bath houses or dying of Aids, Rudolf Nureyev understood as no performing artist had done before him the indivisibility of private and public persona and the ways in which one could be made to serve the other.

He was not the sole inventor of the cult of celebrity, living as he did in an epoch of Kennedys and Beatles, but he added to the infant glamour industry the element of being famous for being famous. No more than five or six million spectators ever saw Nureyev dance, yet a third of the world's population knew his name, recognised his face and identified intimately with some aspect of his story or his myth.

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How Nureyev Played the Fame Game ; a New Biography Reveals the Narcissistic Russian Ballet Legend to Be the Prototype Modern Celebrity

Freedom lovers applauded his flight from Soviet repression; women marvelled at the way his magic touch restored Covent Garden's middle- aged Margot to the first flush of love; gay men were awestruck by his feral i...

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