Diana Menuhin, 90; Dancer, Widow of Violin Maestro Yehudi Menuhin

Diana Menuhin, who gave up a promising ballet career to devote her life to her husband, the violin maestro Yehudi Menuhin, died Jan. 25 in London. She was 90.

Devoted, supportive and sometimes acerbic, Diana Menuhin was the ideal foil for the dreamy, otherworldly genius of her husband, and became the guardian of his formidable talent.

Observers believe that without her, Yehudi Menuhin, who died in 1999, would never have become a global musical force or been such a champion of artistic and humanitarian causes.

Diana Menuhin did not regret giving up ballet, though she confessed to occasional nostalgia for her career. “If one performing artist marries another, it is obvious that one of the two must dissolve his or her persona in the other,” she wrote in 1984.

Born Diana Gould in London, she joined Marie Rambert’s new ballet school in Notting Hill at the age of 9. She made her professional debut as a teenager at a private recital.

When Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev came to Rambert’s studio looking for dancers, he picked Gould. But Diaghilev died before she could join his company.

“I was beginning to believe that there had been a Black Fairy at my christening, and indeed for a great deal of my life, I have heard the beating of her wings,” she later wrote.

She danced for Rambert and for the Vic-Wells Ballet troupe. In 1933, she joined George Ballanchine’s Ballets for the short seasons in Paris and London. Later, she worked with Markova-Dolin Ballet.

In her memoirs, “Fiddler’s Moll,” Menuhin recalled meeting the ballet greats, including Ballanchine and Bronislava Nijinska.

“I may have only lived and danced in the afterglow, but, looking back, I realize I had known and been a tiny part of something very valuable and precious,” she wrote.

When Arts Theatre Ballet was formed in 1940, she became its leading dancer, and worked on the London stage throughout World War II.

Yehudi Menuhin, who was unhappily married, courted her for three years. They finally married in London in 1947, when she was 35.

Diana Menuhin followed her husband around the world, gave birth to two sons, and was stepmother to Menuhin’s elder son and daughter.

As the couple became wealthy, they built homes in Switzerland and Greece, and became friends with such leaders as the Dalai Lama and Jawaharlal Nehru. She is survived by her sons, stepchildren and grandchildren.