Tanaquil Le Clercq; Polio Ended Dancing Career of New York City Ballet Star

Tanaquil Le Clercq, the legendary American ballerina whom poet Frank O’Hara once called “perfection’s broken heart,” died Sunday at New York Hospital at age 71. According to sources at the New York City Ballet, her home company, the cause of death was pneumonia.

The fourth wife of choreographer George Balanchine, Le Clercq danced to great acclaim for his New York City Ballet in the 1940s and ‘50s. But her career ended tragically in 1956 when she contracted paralytic polio at the height of her powers while on tour with the company in Denmark.

She never walked again but wrote two books--”Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat” (1964) and “The Ballet Cookbook” (1966)--and she taught at the Dance Theatre of Harlem from 1974 to 1982.

But it is as the epitome of City Ballet style and artistry that she will be remembered--most of all in the varied roles that Balanchine choreographed for her in such masterworks as the starkly contemporary “Four Temperaments” (1946), the elegantly neoclassic “Symphony in C” (1948), the dramatic “Orpheus” (1948), the eerie “La Valse” (1951), the high-spirited “Western Symphony” (1954) and the serene “Divertimento No. 15” (1956).

However, she also created roles in enduring ballets by Jerome Robbins, including the sensuous “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953) and the parodistic “The Concert” (1956). To all her roles she inevitably brought what veteran critic B.H. Haggin called “the technique, style and presence of a great ballerina.”

“What contributed to making Le Clercq a fascinating and compelling dancer for the spectator was the personality that irradiated her face and made it the dramatic mask of a great actress,” Haggin wrote in 1981. “She was a delightful comic in the last movement of ‘Western Symphony’ and . . . as the doomed girl in ‘La Valse’ . . . she has never been equaled.”

The daughter of an American mother and a French father, Le Clercq was born on Oct. 2, 1929, in Paris and was brought to New York at the age of 3. Four years later, she began taking ballet classes--first with Bolshoi Ballet alumnus Mikhail Mordkin and later at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet.

While still a student, she created the role of the soulful second ballerina in Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante” in 1945 and in 1946 the fiery Choleric role in “Four Temperaments” for the Ballet Society, the precursor to the New York City Ballet (formed in 1948).

She was married to Balanchine from 1952 to 1969. He died in 1983 and in his will he left her not only the balance in his checking accounts and royalties from a book he had co-written but the largest bequest to anyone of the future rights and royalties to his ballets.

She died exactly 48 years after their wedding day.