Wallace Potts, 59; Film Archivist for Nureyev’s Movie and Video Works

Wallace Potts, 59, a film archivist for the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation who assembled a comprehensive collection of the famed ballet dancer’s appearances on film and video, died June 29, it was announced by Sir John Tooley, chairman of the foundation, which is based in Bath, England.

Potts died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications from lymphoma. He had been a resident of Los Angeles since about 1980.

In 1999, Potts helped to arrange for the film archive to be housed at the New York Public Library and the Centre Nationale de la Danse, the national dance center in Paris. The archive includes videotape and audiotape interviews with Nureyev as well as dance footage -- some of it filmed by Potts.

Potts, a native of Birmingham, Ala., was an independent filmmaker as well as an archivist and dance historian who wrote and directed several movies, including “Psycho Cop,” a low-budget horror film of 1988. He was also an assistant director on a movie of the ballet “Don Quixote,” which Nureyev co-directed with dancer Robert Helpmann in 1972.