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Violetta Elvin
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Long before the Bolshoi or the Kirov had toured in the West, British ballet had its own Soviet ballerina. Violetta Prokhorova was a soloist at the Bolshoi when in 1945 she met British architect Harold Elvin, married him, and was allowed to leave Moscow with him for a new life in London. 
(On the journey she played chess with Shostakovich.) Ninette de Valois invited her to join the Sadler's Wells Ballet, and she made her début on the second night of the company's first Covent Garden season, in the Bluebird pas de deux in Sleeping Beauty. By the next season she had started to use her married name, and over the next ten years she became one of the company's most popular ballerinas - in many people's opinion, second only to Fonteyn.
Elvin was still only 20 when she came to England, but had already danced the leads in Swan Lake, Don Quixote and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai with the State Ballet of Tashkent. She was regarded as one of the Bolshoi's most promising talents - so much so that she was taken straight into the company as a soloist, never having to dance in the corps de ballet. Her Russian training and her beauty gave a glamour and exoticism to her early appearances here, and although she adapted her style over the years she never lost the unique authority her background gave her. As might be expected, some of her major successes were in the classics - as Aurora and Odette/Odile in particular she was widely regarded as Fonteyn's closest rival. But she was also notable in Balanchine's Ballet Imperial and Massine's Three-Cornered Hat, and Roland Petit gave her the lead in Ballabile, the first ballet he ever made for Sadler's Wells. Fortunately, both for her and for us, Elvin also caught Frederick Ashton's eye, and from the roles he made for her we can know how she danced. She was one of the original seven ballerinas in Birthday Offering - her solo is the fifth one - and she created the Fairy Summer in Cinderella: these both embody the warmth and languor of her dancing, whilst the sexy Lykanion in Daphnis and Chloe shows the sultry glamour needed to contrast with Chloe's innocence. Replacing her in any of these roles has always been one of the company's most difficult challenges. When she was still at the height of her career, and only 30, Elvin fell in love with an Italian and left the stage to live with him near Naples, where she helped manage a hotel belonging to his brother. She made a brief return to the ballet world in 1985 to direct the ballet at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, but - like so many others - she found the working conditions of an Italian opera house impossible, and resigned after her first season. Her personality and her style left a lasting impression on the Royal Ballet, and the grown-up femininity of the roles she created are her legacy to us.
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