In Good Company: Sixty Years With the Royal Ballet

No other dancer has ever matched Leslie Edwards' amazing career with the Royal Ballet: more than sixty years of performing, starting in 1933 and continuing even beyond his official retirement in November 1993. In addition, for the first six years of his career he appeared frequently with Ballet Rambert, and later on was involved with outside events, often featuring Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. And something much more than the length and breadth of his career marked it out as special: there was also the great admiration and affection which he won from audiences and his fellow artists. Over the years he had a respectable share of leading roles, many of them created by some of the great choreographers of the twentieth century - Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, John Cranko, Robert Helpmann, and Kenneth MacMillan among others. However, he was seen more often in smaller parts, and he showed again and again that these can make just as vital a contribution to a ballet's total effect. It was not by chance that both de Valois and Helpmann remarked to him that he knew how to make something out of little material. Leslie Edwards was a remarkable and much loved man. This autobiography is peppered with the names of the many famous people with whom he worked and whom he befriended, but he relates a lifetime spent working with the Royal Ballet with charm, modesty, and good humour.