Leslie Edwards (1916-2001). British Dancer, teacher and director

Leslie Edwards was born in Teddington, Middlesex, in 1916. He studied with Marie Rambert, as well as with Margaret Craske, Stanislas Idzikowski and Vera Volkova. In 1933 he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet before transferring to Ballet Rambert from 1935 until 1937. Thereafter he returned to Sadler’s Wells to dance with the Vic-Wells Ballet where, apart from two years of war service, he remained for the rest of a long and distinguished career.

Always elegant and stylish, Edwards was particularly notable for his performances as a character actor/dancer, ranging over the magisterial, the comic and the pathetic. He created the role of the Beggar in Robert Helpmann’s Miracle of the Gorbals, was richly royal and stately as a King or a Master of Ceremonies in the big classics, especially as Catalabutte in The Sleeping Beauty, and Escalus, the Prince of Verona in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and was superbly comic as Farmer Thomas in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée.

Apart from his stage presence, for many years Edwards played a much-valued role in The Royal Ballet, both as ballet master and as director of The Royal Ballet Choreographic Group. He finally retired from The Royal Ballet in 1993, and died in London in 2001. He was appointed OBE in 1975.