City ballet great dies in his sleep
From The Evening News (Edinburgh)

A FORMER principal dancer from Edinburgh with the Royal Ballet has died.

Alexander Bennett, a former pupil of Trinity Academy, died in his sleep during a short working trip to Argyll.

The 73-year-old choreographer was working with a ballet group there and had recently choreographed The Nutcracker with them.

Today, his brother Willie, 79 said Mr Bennett’s death was a great loss to ballet.

He said: "He was my little brother and we were very close. He would come back from his travels to stay with me and I will miss him very much.

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<small>[ 27 March 2003, 03:29 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

He will be sadly missed.

Alexander Bennett
By DUNCAN FISHER for The Scotsman

Dancer and choreographer
Born: 27 July, 1929, in Edinburgh
Died: 15 February, 2003, in Taynuilt, Argyll, aged 73

ALEXANDER Bennett was a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and a gifted choreographer and teacher.

As a boy he loved watching films in the then Alhambra Cinema, Leith, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly being his heroes. On one occasion as a young boy he went to the cinema at 3pm. He was discovered at 9pm by his parents, still wearing his school cap, having seen the Fred Astaire film three times.

Educated at Trinity Academy, he performed tap dance as a youngster for the Band of Hope, Rechabites and at Boys’ Brigade concerts, Sunday school and the Youth Fellowship.

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A very nice tribute to Alexander Bennett by Jane Simpson on ballet.co:

http://www.danze.co.uk/dcforum/happening/3417.html

Alexander Bennett
Gifted and intelligent master of the dance. By Jane Pritchard for The Guardian


Alexander Bennett, who has died aged 73, was fortunate to be studying dance in London at just the time when Ballet Rambert was short of male dancers. He was taken on as the company was planning the Chaucer-inspired Canterbury Prologue for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and his talent and intelligence as a performer and partner quickly enabled him to secure principal roles.
Like so many others in the 1940s, Bennett was introduced to dance by watching Fred Astaire on screen. The sight of the Sadler's Wells Ballet performing in Edinburgh, in August 1946, inspired him, at the age of 17, to attend ballet classes with Marjorie Middleton, one of his home city's leading dance teachers. She was impressed, and used him in The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse at the Edinburgh Ballet Club in 1948.

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Alexander Bennett
Dancer who, against advice, gave up his day job and went on to be a star of Rambert and the Royal Ballet. From The Times


The family of Alexander Bennett, although sympathetic to his hopes, advised him that, since he was already 21 after National Service in the Intelligence Corps, it was too late to give up his desk job in the hope of becoming a professional dancer. Marie Rambert, whose ballet classes he attended part-time, agreed that it would be rash.

But they were wrong. Within weeks Rambert, having lost two leading men from her company, changed her mind and made him an offer. Tall and handsomely built, he undertook intensive coaching and took his first solo role only three months later, beginning a career that took him as a principal dancer from Ballet Rambert to the Royal Ballet, and then kept him busy teaching and producing around the world until the very day of his death, aged 73.

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Alexander Bennett
Linguist turned ballet dancer. By Nadine Meisner for the Independent

Despite a late start, Alexander Bennett became a leading dancer, first with Ballet Rambert, then Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, sister company to the Royal Ballet. He was one of the rare Royal Ballet recruits not to have gone through the Royal Ballet School system. That he succeeded so well may have owed something to the shortage of male dancers during the 1950s; but even more to his own very real qualities. Tallish, blond and handsome, he was an alluring performer. His abilities, however, existed not just in his body, but in his brain. He was a talented linguist and he had an engaging personality that was friendly, persuasive and resourceful.

Born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1929, he came from a working-class family (his father was a tram driver) which nevertheless valued education and put him and his elder brother William through the fee-paying Trinity Academy.

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=391119