General
Kirsten Simone, Danish Ballet Star, Is Dead at 90
One of Denmark’s most authoritative ballerinas, she was a prominent figure in a country better known for its male dancers.
Kirsten Simone, one of Denmark’s most authoritative ballerinas, who spanned the Danish, Russian classical and dramatic repertoires, died on Dec. 19 in Copenhagen. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital after a short illness, was confirmed by her brother Flemming Ryberg.
In a country known more for its male ballet dancers, Ms. Simone became the Royal Danish Ballet’s leading classical ballerina during the 1950s and ’60s, and a star. Significantly, she was one of the first to transcend the Danish repertoire, making her mark in ballets like “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty” and touring abroad widely.
She appeared at the Bolshoi in Moscow, with American Ballet Theater and with the London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet). She also starred in a Disney made-for-TV film, “Ballerina,” in 1966, in which she played a version of herself, a ballet star who mentors a young girl with dreams of dancing with the Royal Danish Ballet.
Ms. Simone had nourished similar dreams, and she eventually exceeded them, performing all the major roles in the Danish ballet repertoire, which is based on the works of the 19th-century choreographer August Bournonville. Through the clarity and amplitude of her technique, her exciting musicality and the force of her stage personality, she also became one of the first Danish dancers to take on the full range of the international ballet repertoire, unusual for a Danish ballerina at the time.
“I think it’s fair to say Simone was the Danish Fonteyn, a ballerina with a regal image,” the Danish critic and historian Alexander Meinertz said in an interview.
Like the Danish dancers Erik Bruhn and Henning Kronstam, with whom she was frequently partnered, Ms. Simone was a member of the first generation of Danish dancers to supplement traditional Danish technique with Russian training under Vera Volkova, who came to the Royal Danish Ballet in 1951 and who became Ms. Simone’s teacher as well as her champion.
