Dame Ninette De Valois, who celebrates her 100th birthday today, is the mother of British ballet.
The vision, courage and determination she showed in 1928 when she founded the Vic-Wells Ballet, led by Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin (the Irish dancer, Patrick Healy-Kay), will be understood when it is appreciated that ballet in England then was at a similar stage of development to that currently existing in Ireland, but without even the limited Arts Council funding.
Yet, despite her stage name, "Madame", as she was always called by her companies, is Irish.
When she began her career with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1923, it was the fashion for Western dancers to adopt Russian names, but her mother chose the name of Ninette de Valois for her because of her Huguenot ancestry and because when Picasso met her in Monte Carlo he described her as "more French than the French". She was, however, born Edris Stannus at Baltiboys House in Blessington, Co Wicklow.
When the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet was playing Dublin's Olympia Theatre in December 1955, de Valois revisited her old home. Up for sale, it reminded her of the last act of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with much of its land already under the still waters of the Poulaphouca Reservoir. In her memoirs Come Dance With Me (1957) she wrote: "I feel that here, at the foot of these Wicklow Hills, lies the midnight of the first seven years of my life."
These began inauspiciously. The bonfire lit on the fox covert two years earlier to announce her elder sister Thelma's birth was not repeated on June 6th, 1898, when Capt Stannus heard that his hoped-for son had not arrived.
It was lit two years later for the arrival of her brother, Trevor, and again for the youngest, Gordon, better known as photographer Gordon Anthony, thanks to whom we have hundreds of photos of his sister, her ballets and dancers from her companies.
As de Valois prophesied at nine years of age when told of the cancelled bonfire, she was to light her own.
At seven she saw a Miss Legatt Byrne dance at a party and insisted on performing a jig herself. Then she saw her first pantomime in Dublin's Gaiety and determined on a career in theatre.
Going to live with her grandmother in Walmer, Kent, when her family could no longer afford the upkeep of Baltiboys, she began training in classical ballet, dancing The Dying Swan for her school company after seeing Pavlova dance and memorising the choreography.
Dancing roles in revue, pantomime and variety followed and, by also teaching, she earned tuition fees for training with the great teacher Enrico Cecchetti, who recommended her to Diaghilev. Her two years with his Ballets Russes, dancing all over western Europe, are chronicled in her book Invitation to the Ballet (1937).
Then in 1927 she met W.B. Yeats, who invited her to run a ballet school at the Abbey and arrange movement and perform in his Plays for Dancers.
In her copy of The King of the Great Clock Tower, Yeats wrote: "To Ninette de Valois, asking her pardon for covering her expressive face with a mask." But de Valois told the Department of Dance at York University, Toronto, in 1976 that the mask influenced her entire attitude to the relationship between dancers, choreographers and the theatre.
Then Lilian Baylis, the formidable and eccentric manager of the Old Vic Theatre wanted a movement coach who could arrange Shakespearean dances.
By 1931 Madame had closed the private school she founded in 1926 to head the Vic-Wells Ballet Company and School. It was the birth of British ballet. How she encouraged choreographers like Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, introduced to ballet designers like Rex Whistler, Oliver Messel and John Piper, created ballets like Job (1931), The Rake's Progress (1935) and Check- mate (1937), developed dancers like Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann and invited Nureyev to join the Royal Ballet is by now the stuff of legend.
Under de Valois's firm guidance the Vic-Wells became the Sadler's Wells Ballet, developing its own home-grown stars and a younger sister, the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet.
Then in 1946 it became the Royal Ballet based at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Its younger sister remained at Sadler's Wells Theatre, called the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, until it moved to Birmingham, to become known as the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Kind, sensible and outspoken, de Valois has always had absolute integrity. A strict disciplinarian, she has never demanded more of her dancers than of herself, and continuing to dance until 1937 despite pain from an operation in 1935. The latter, however, led to her long and happy marriage to the Irish surgeon who operated on her, the late Dr Arthur Connell.
She retired as director of the Royal Ballet in 1963, loaded with honours, including a CBE (1947), Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur (1950), and Dame of the Order of the British Empire (1951).
In 1964 she received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society, the first woman to do so since Marie Curie in 1910, and in 1961 became the first woman to receive an Erasmus Prize from the Dutch government.
In 1980 she received an Irish Community Award and in 1981 the British Companion of Honour.
She continued directing the Royal Ballet School until 1972, remaining on the board of governors of the Royal Ballet and becoming patron of Irish National Ballet.
In recent years ill-health interrupted her many activities, her last public appearance being at a gala performance by the Royal Ballet School last July.
The temporary closure of the Royal Opera House has prevented birthday celebrations by the Royal Ballet, but the Birmingham Royal Ballet is performing a tribute programme with birthday cake today for every member of the audience.
The director, David Bintley, has choreographed a new work, The Protecting Veil, in her honour and revived her 1940 comic ballet about theatre life, The Prospect Before Us, but her centenary will be celebrated today throughout the world of dance.