Nicholas Beriozoff (1906–1996). Lithuanian-born dancer, ballet master, director and choreographer

Nicholas Beriozoff was born in Lithuania in 1906. He studied at the National Ballet School in Prague and danced with both the Prague Opera Ballet and the Lithuanian National Ballet before joining the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo under René Blum in 1935. It was here that he became rehearsal assistant to Fokine and learnt a vast amount about the Fokine repertoire. He stopped dancing in 1944 and became a renowned ballet master, specialising in rehearsing, reviving and staging Fokine’s ballets. He worked with many European companies over the next half a century, including several times with London Festival Ballet. He was ballet master for the company from 1951 until 1954 and he revived Les Sylphides, Petrushka, Schéhérazade and the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor – ballets for which the new, young company were rightly famous. He was the father of the great Royal Ballet ballerina Svetlana Beriosova. Nicholas Beriozoff died in 1996.