For the ballerina Beryl Goldwyn, who has died of cancer aged 91, there was something satisfying about beginning her career on the stage of the Royal Opera House with Margot Fonteyn in The Sleeping Beauty in 1946, and ending it with Sylvie Guillem in Don Quixote in 1993-94.
In these ballets she played minor roles – a mouse entering with Carabosse’s carriage and a Spanish woman – but in between she was a ballerina in her own right, acclaimed for her performances of Giselle. The critic Peter Williams noted that in Giselle’s mad scene, “it is possible to see the chill of death passing up her arms from her fingertips”. When she played the spirit in Act II, “her supernatural and ethereal qualities bore a certain resemblance to [Alicia] Markova” and, like Yvette Chauviré, “she brings something of the live Giselle to the novice Wili”.
