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.
She was known as much for her hard work in the studio as for her grandeur onstage. “What attracted Volkova to Simone wasn’t so much her physicality as her character,” Mr. Meinertz said. “She was a woman with an iron will.”
Ms. Simone was also favored by foreign choreographers who came to Denmark. In 1956 she caught the eye of the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, who by then had helped found the New York City Ballet.
Balanchine spent several months in Copenhagen after his wife, the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, developed polio while on tour there. During that time, he staged the ballets “Serenade” and “Apollo,” in which Ms. Simone played the muse Polyhymnia, for the national company. She went on to perform several more Balanchine works, including the virtuosic first movement of his “Symphony in C”; the enigmatic role of Sanguinic in the more modernist “The Four Temperaments”; and the sleepwalker in the operatic “La Sonnambula.”
In contrast to her cool, regal bearing in classical ballets, Ms. Simone also made a powerful impression in dramatic works like “Miss Julie” (1958), choreographed by Birgit Cullberg and based on the play by August Strindberg, and Roland Petit’s “Carmen” (1960).
“She had a lot of temperament,” the documentarian Marianne Kemp, a friend, said in an interview, referring to Ms. Simone’s strong character and occasional sharp tongue. “And that temperament was reflected in her dancing.”
In 1965, Ms. Simone was made a knight of the Order of Dannebrog by King Frederick IX. The next year, she was given the title “forstesolodanser”— roughly the equivalent of “first dancer of the company”— which has been given to only two other dancers in the Royal Danish Ballet’s history.
When Ms. Simone’s classical dancing career began to wane in the late 1970s, she became a beloved character dancer and mime, especially in ballets by Bournonville, playing characters who added to the storytelling but did not dance. Here she revealed a sharp wit and comic timing.
She shared her deep understanding of Bournonville with younger dancers. “She was a real carrier of the living tradition for the Royal Danish Ballet onstage, in the wings and during work in the studio,” the dancer Thomas Lund, who on many occasions shared the stage with Ms. Simone, said in an interview.
In the late 1990s, when the young choreographer Alexei Ratmansky was a dancer at the company, she took him and his wife, Tatiana, under her wing, giving them pointers on the more naturalistic Danish style of balletic mime. “It was impossible to take your eyes off her,” Mr. Ratmansky wrote on Facebook about her stage acting. “It was a revelation for me that pantomime could bring so much depth to a performance.”
Mr. Ratmansky, in turn, created a role for her in “The Nutcracker,” his first evening-length ballet for the company. As a queen-bee-like Sugarplum Fairy (she was 67 at the time), she was escorted by a retinue of girls from the ballet school.
She was awarded the Ingenio et Arti medal by Queen Margrethe II in 2001. Her final appearance onstage was in 2006, at 72; she played the nurse in a version of “Romeo and Juliet” by John Neumeier.
Kirsten Anne-Lise Simonsen was born on July 1, 1934, in Copenhagen. Her father, Carl Christian Simonsen, was a radio technician, and her mother, Anna Carla Ryberg, was a switchboard operator. Simone’s older brother, John Simonsen, died in 2008. Her younger brother, Mr. Ryberg, also became a principal dancer at the Royal Danish Ballet. The two siblings danced together throughout their careers, in ballets like “La Sylphide,” “Napoli” and “Sleeping Beauty.”
“We liked dancing together,” Mr. Ryberg said. “We understood each other and we had the same musicality. And she was the right height for me.”
Ms. Simone began her ballet studies at a small neighborhood school at the age of 4. At 11, she was accepted to the Royal Danish Ballet school, where she received training in acting from the renowned mime artist Gerda Karstens, among others. In 1951, her last year at the school, she began to work with Ms. Volkova. She joined the Royal Danish Ballet the next year.
In the 2000s, after retiring from performing, Ms. Simone began aiding in the cataloging of images and films of Danish dancers for the company archives, with help from Ms. Kemp, the documentarian. Ms. Simone also taught at the company school for many years. She lived not far from the theater, in an apartment on Nyhavn Harbor, with its charming view of colored facades, famous from countless postcards.
Ms. Simone never married or had children. Mr. Ryberg is her only immediate survivor.
Even in her final years, Ms. Kemp said, Ms. Simone went to the theater most days to work in the archives and watch rehearsals at the theater.
“For her it was ballet, ballet, ballet,” Ms. Kemp said. “The theater was her whole life.”
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