June Brae (1917-2000). British dancer

June Brae, originally June Bear, was born in Hampshire in 1917, but brought up in China, where she first studied ballet and met Margot Fonteyn. She became one of the leading dancers in the Vic-Wells Ballet, which she joined in 1935 after having studied at the Sadler’s Wells School from 1933. She was inextricably linked with Pamela May, with whom she frequently danced in tandem. As a dancer she was highly versatile and beautiful. She was noted for her particular combination of delicacy and gaiety, but she also conveyed the menace and power of the Black Queen in Ninette de Valois’ Checkmate, a role she created.
She was the Rich Girl in Frederick Ashton’s Nocturne, a skater in his Les Patineurs, and most memorably the tipsy Josephine in A Wedding Bouquet. She was the Lilac Fairy when the The Sleeping Princess (Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty) was first staged by Nicholas Sergeyev for the company in 1939 and was the ballerina in Helpmann’s short-lived Adam Zero in 1946, for which she came out from her first retirement in 1942. In 1946 she took the lead in Andrée Howard’s Assembly Ball, and then retired definitively, apart from an appearance in 1981 in De Valois’ The Rake’s Progress to mark the company’s 50th Anniversary. June Brae died in Bath in 2000.