Laura Davis meets the Liverpool Theatre School teachers who danced with Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn

THE first time Marian St Claire met ballet supremo Rudolph Nureyev she surprised him on stage during a performance.

Dazzlingly brilliant but with a fearsome reputation, he had been lured back to London Festival Ballet for its 1978 US tour after falling out with its artistic director Dame Beryl Grey when he kicked her in the bottom, fracturing her coccyx.

But he was no match for “Tiny Marian” as Grey was wont to call her.

The encounter took place on stage in Washington where St Claire was a last minute replacement for one of the two female leads in Bournonville’s Le Conservatoire.

The first Nureyev knew of the swap was when he arrived on stage half an hour late, after getting dressed in the wings.

“He looked at me and he’d never seen me before,” she recalls. “So I turned to him and winked. It was too late because the curtain was going up – he couldn’t do anything.”

Le Conservatoire was performed as a 30-minute curtain raiser to Giselle, in which Nureyev was starring. Not taking it very seriously, he would pull faces at the corps de ballet whenever he had his back to the audience.

But on this occasion the onlookers seemed unusually attentive – drawn in by the interaction between St Claire playing the snooty elder ballerina and Vivien Loeber as the younger.

“So he started to pull his finger out,” says St Claire’s husband and fellow Liverpool Theatre school teacher Michael Beare.

“He nearly danced himself to death – he probably hardly had the energy to do Giselle afterwards.”

Nureyev was just one of many fascinating characters the couple would meet during their careers as professional dancers. Another was his most famous dance partner Dame Margot Fonteyn, who was persuaded to tour with Scottish Ballet in 1974 at the grand age of 54.

The company needed a big star to carry its first international tour. To persuade her to sign up, St Claire, at the time Scottish Ballet’s principal ballerina, was asked to dance for her.

“She walked into the studio in this black mink coat and she was so beautiful,” she recalls. “To actually see her face-to-face you were gobsmacked. I danced myself to death, thinking ‘oh I’m sure this is rubbish’.”

It wasn’t of course and Fonteyn agreed to the tour, which involved eight performances per week for two and a half months, realising she could change the choreography of La Sylphide to suit her now less nimble frame.

“She said she felt like a young girl again, like she was in her Sadler’s Wells days in the 40s,” remembersBeare.

“Dame Margot was a great giggler,” continues St Claire.

“She loved to go out and have steak, chips, salad and a glass of wine. She loved to party.

“When you travelled with Margot you never used your passport – you were whisked through.”

Despite this special treatment, Fonteyn never forgot her colleagues. After one performance she persuaded the waiters at a dignitaries’ reception to hold back dishes of food for the dancers who had not yet arrived.

“By the time you’ve got your make-up off and have showered and changed all the canapes and everything have always gone and the dancers are starving,” explains Beare.

“Suddenly Margot comes rushing through ‘this way, this way’ and she’s wearing this gorgeous cream chiffon Yves Saint Lauren gown that she’d flown to Paris to pick up,” laughs St Claire. “She took us to a huge round table and started arranging the food.”

“That’s the sort of person she was,” adds Beare. “She was very unselfish and she used to get mad if she thought the dancers were getting taken for granted.”

Such fine receptions and worldwide trips were far from their early experiences. Only child St Claire, or “Midge” as her friends often call her, was born in Hull where she was sent to dancing school to tackle her shyness.

Her father, a decorated member of Bomber Command during World War II, struggled to find work after leaving the Airforce and took a job gutting fish at the docks.

He later moved the family to Lancashire where he worked at car manufacturer British Leyland and St Claire eventually studied at the Loreto Academy of Dance in Southport before winning a place at London’s Ballet Rambert at the age of 19.

Two years later she made her first plane journey to South Africa to join Cape Town Ballet.

“I was brought up in a small, end of terraced house that backed on to bus station,” she says. “Looking out of my bedroom window was a brick wall so my life had been grey almost.

“I got off the plane in Cape Town and it was like I saw colour for the first time in my life.”

For Beare, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the experience was almost the opposite. Discovered by Royal Ballet principal Peter Franklin White some years after his mother had taken him, as a four-year-old, to a dance class dressed in his swimming trunks and white socks – “because they thought I’d do one class and hate it” – he found himself in London on a bleak November day, wondering why there were no leaves on the trees.

“Then of course when I saw my first spring and greenery suddenly coming from out of nowhere amongst all this grey concrete and red brick and chimney pots,” he recalls. “That was magical to me.”

The couple met while members of Scottish Ballet in the 70s and, after working for several other prestigious companies, found themselves helping to set up London City Ballet in the early-80s.

Founded by St Claire’s ex-husband, Harold King, it was honoured to have as its patron Lady (later Princess) Diana.

“Harold said ‘I’m going to get her’ – can you imagine!” exclaims Beare. But get her he did, after finding the telephone number for Buckingham Palace in the Yellow Pages.

“She was a marvellous patron, she did so many city lunches to raise money and people would pay a fortune just to sit at her table,” adds Beare.

The Princess was a regular visitor to rehearsals, when she would sit on the floor and chat to the dancers.

“The first time she ever came to the studio she fell over the step and started giggling,” reveals St Claire, who later partnered Wayne Sleep.

“She was very down to earth and thoughtful and she loved dessert – she used to always finish off Harold’s when they went out to lunch.

“When she attended our premiere of Carmen in Oslo she was pregnant with Harry but she didn’t let on until the trip was over because she knew it would eclypse any publicity for the ballet.”

After her divorce, Princess Diana gave up the majority of her patronages, including London City Ballet.

Unable to attract Arts Council funding, the company eventually closed in 1996.

St Claire and Beare now spend their time teaching a new generation of dancers at Liverpool Theatre School in Aigburth.

“We’ve always loved what we do,” she says. “To perform on stage and meet such interesting people just by doing a job is really wonderful.”