Doctor Confirms Nureyev Had AIDS Virus

Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev had the AIDS virus and had known it since November, 1984, his doctor confirmed Friday.

“I make this announcement today because it is not a shameful illness,” Dr. Michel Canesi said.

A medical bulletin released by the doctor when Nureyev died Jan. 6 said only that the dancer and choreographer had died of “a cardiac complication following a cruel illness.”

“Rudolf did not want people to speak of his illness during his lifetime for professional reasons, for fear that the world would once again be closed to him,” the doctor said in an apparent reference to the dancer’s exile from the Soviet Union.

Canesi said blood tests taken at the end of 1984 showed the dancer had the AIDS virus. “Considering what we know today, and considering the biological reports, he could have been contaminated four or five years previously,” Canesi said.

Having learned of his condition, Nureyev showed concern but was not obsessed with it, his doctor said.

“Beginning in the spring of 1992 we entered into the final phase, the most painful and moving stage of the disease,” Canesi said.

Yet even under the agonizing conditions of the fully developed AIDS virus, Nureyev continued to work. Nureyev directed “Romeo and Juliet” from the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on May 6, 1992, and following a vacation in Italy, he returned to Paris in September for rehearsals of “La Bayadere” with the Paris Opera Ballet Company where he served as artistic director.

Following the ballet’s triumphal opening on Oct. 8, Nureyev left to rest on the island of St. Bartholomew in the Caribbean. On Nov. 20, he was again hospitalized in Paris.