Leslie Edwards - Brief Article - Obituary

Dance Magazine, May, 2001 by Clive Barnes

Leslie Edwards, born in London on August 6, 1916, always seemed part of the fabric of The Royal Ballet. With his death at his home in London on February 9, one of the final links was broken with Ninette de Valois's original pre-war Vic-Wells Ballet, The Royal Ballet's modest precursor. He studied dance with Marie Rambert and at the Vic-Wells Ballet School. Though he made his stage debut with Rambert's Ballet Club in 1932, from 1933, when he first danced with the Vic-Wells Ballet, the latter became his major affiliation. His entire sixty-year career was with what became The Royal Ballet organization, until his final retirement from the stage in 1993.

Never blessed with a strong classical technique, Edwards first moved to character roles and then, in his later years, purely mime parts. While still a principal with The Royal Ballet, he taught mime at The Royal Ballet School, worked as a company repetiteur from 1959 to 1970, and was the first director of the newly formed Royal Ballet Choreographic Group from 1967 to 1987. Here he assisted many emerging British choreographers, notably Ronald Hynd, Geoffrey Cauley, David Bintley, and Michael Corder. He also served as ballet master for Britain's Royal Opera, supervising all the opera ballets, from 1970 to 1990.

Over his career Edwards originated many roles and appeared in dozens of ballets. Two of his most notable creations were the rheumy-eyed, dustbin-scavenging Beggar in Robert Helpmann's 1944 ballet Miracle in the Gorbals, and his wonderful, very English concept of a French farmer, Thomas, in Frederick Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee. But he is most likely to live in memory for the seemingly small role of Catalabutte, the Master of Ceremonies, in The Sleeping Beauty. Snooty, cowardly, flattering, but always the courtier of courtiers, Edwards made Catalabutte over the years into a kind of cottage industry.