46 1GM Monday August 3 2020 | the times
Register
Such was the public demand that
BBC television secured the company’s
services at short notice to broadcast ex-
cerpts from their repertoire. Two years
later Fadeyechev returned to London
to make a full-length televised version
of Giselle, this time with Nadia Nerina
of the Royal Ballet. Peter Wright, who
later created his own stagings of the
classics, was also involved. “I was ap-
pearing as Wilfred, and Fadeyechev
taught me a lot about the timing and
the weight behind the movements in
the mime scenes,” Wright told Dancing
Times in 2016.
Fadeyechev remained a mainstay of
the Bolshoi, his repertoire ranging from
the Mouse King in Tchaikovsky’s The
Nutcracker and Bluebird in the samecomposer’s The Sleeping Beauty in the
early 1950s, to roles that he created in-
cluding Karenin in Rodion Shchedrin’s
Anna Karenina in 1972, choreographed
by Shchedrin’s wife, Maya Plisetskaya
(obituary, May 5, 2015). He was one of
Plisetskaya’s favourite dance partners
and she once described him as “an artist
who cannot be spoiled by praise”.
Like many dancers, Fadeyechev
could be superstitious, including wait-
ing if a black cat was crossing his path.
“On the day of a performance, some of
us jump through the [theatre] door on
one leg for luck,” he told the Honolulu
Advertiser before a visit to Hawaii in- “It’s a small, maybe silly thing, but
we believe.”
Nikolai Borisovich Fadeyechev was
ism and sexism — and her visceral re-
jection of all three. “Very early on, I felt... there were those who oppressed and
those who were oppressed,” she said on
television in 1974.
Despite threats of violence, she plead-
ed on behalf of Algerian nationalists,
Basque separatists in Spain and alleged
coup plotters in Brazzaville, and took
part in the Russell Tribunal, a private
court set up by the British philosopher
Bertrand Russell to expose US crimes in
the Vietnam War. Her campaigning as a
A diplomatic incident involving a Sov-
iet discus thrower accused of shoplift-
ing hats in Oxford Street threatened to
scupper the Bolshoi Ballet’s first visit to
the West in 1956 at the height of the
Cold War. Yet the public excitement
was too great to be disturbed by such a
trivial mishap: people queued for days
for tickets; the press was wild with spec-
ulation; and when the dancers finally
landed there was talk of “golden-
haired” spies.
Among their number was the 23-
year-old Nikolai Fadeyechev, who was
making his debut as Count Albrecht in
Giselle with Galina Ulanova. She later
told how although they had rehearsed
the work in Moscow, they had never
performed it together before arriving in
London. Yet “any fears were needless”,
she said.
Half a century later Fadeyechev re-
called the applause at the Royal Opera
House being so great that he feared an
earthquake had struck. “After my final
variation, the one where Albrecht falls
to the ground, I was lying on the stage
and I couldn’t see what was going on,”
he told Debra Craine in The Times in
- “But I could hear the noise of
stamping feet. I thought there was a fire
in the theatre, or an earthquake, so I
started to crawl towards the wings. I
thought something was wrong. I could
hear people jumping out of their seats
and I was terrified. All this noise, all this
whistling and screaming: we never had
that in Moscow.”
The critics were equally thrilled.
“Miss Ulanova’s first pas de deux in the
second act with Mr Fadeyechev was a
revelation of what orchestral accompa-
niment can do, the conductor following
not driving the dancers,” observed The
Times, adding that “Fadeyechev, be-
sides being a devoted partner, showed
magnificent tours en l’air”.
The applause was so
great that he feared an
earthquake had struck
Nikolai Fadeyechev
Mainstay of the Bolshoi Ballet known for dazzling audiences from Moscow to London at the height of the Cold War
ALAMYGisèle Halimi
Feminist lawyer who helped to legalise abortion in France, befriended Simone de Beauvoir and represented Jean-Paul Sartre
“At this moment, as never before, I feel
a complete and perfect concord
between my work — which is to advo-
cate, to defend — and my own condi-
tion as a woman.” Those were the first
words of Gisèle Halimi’s closing speech
at a historic trial in Paris in 1972. Stand-
ing before four male judges, the
French-Tunisian lawyer was defending
three women accused of involvement
in a clandestine abortion, at the request
of a girl aged 16 who had been raped.
Halimi had terminated three of her
own pregnancies, and viewed the crim-
inalisation of abortion as deeply unjust.
Though the women pleaded guilty, her
stirring words ensured none would go
to prison, nor pay a fine. It was a defin-
ing moment that helped to pave the
way for a law that legalised abortion in
France in 1975.
Halimi spoke at the Bar as much to
sway public opinion and inspire legal
reform as to defend her clients. She
shared many of the radical views of her
friend and frequent colleague, the phi-
losopher Simone de Beauvoir. How-
ever, Halimi said that while De Beau-
voir arrived at her ideology through
theory, her own views were formed
from personal experience. Growing up
in a conservative Jewish family of mod-
est means in colonial Tunisia framed
her understanding of racism, colonial-
lawyer as well as her three-year term as
a French MP in the early 1980s contrib-
uted to the passing of laws that abolished
the death penalty, refined the definition
of rape, and extended the heterosexual
age of consent (15) to homosexuality.
Before then, same-sex relations were
only legal from the age of 21.
She was born Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb
in Tunis in 1927 to Edouard Taïeb, a
lawyer’s clerk who would adopt French
nationality, and Fortunée Metoudi, a
stay-at-home mother known as Fritna.
Her father was so disappointed not to
have another son that her birth was not
announced to friends or extended
family for two weeks. Though she out-
performed her eldest brother in school,
her parents placed all their hopes on
him. “Your school fees could cover the
cost of your dowry!” Fritna told her.
Aged ten, Gisèle refused to perform
chores from which her brothers were
exempt and went on hunger strike.
After three days her startled parents
gave in. At 16, she defied an even higher
authority: God. On her way to school
one morning, Gisèle, the granddaugh-
ter of a rabbi, chose not to kiss the me-
zuzah, the parchment on the doorposts
of Jewish homes. Contrary to what she
had been taught, failing to observe the
rite had not caused her to fail her exam.
She obtained the highest grade.“Do you think you’re some kind of
lawyer?” people would mock her when
she argued her case as a child, which de-
cided her future. Returning home after
studying law and philosophy in Paris,
Halimi befriended Habib Bourguiba,
the nationalist leader who would be-
come the first president of an inde-
pendent Tunisia. In the lead-up to the
decolonisation of Tunisia and Algeria,
she spent days in military courts de-
fending independence fighters, includ-
ing some who had been tortured and
sexually abused at the hands of French
troops. When her clients were sen-
tenced to death, the president of France
would grant her audiences in which she
might plead for clemency. Male lawyers
were often received in this way; no
woman had been before.
The first president she dealt with,
René Coty, began by asking her to smile.
“I will if you grant me my request,” she
retorted. He did. The second, Charles de
Gaulle, asked whether he should ad-
dress her as Madame or Mademoiselle.
Thinking her marital status was none of
his concern, she replied: “Call me Maî-
tre,” the lawyers’ honorific. He, too, par-
doned her clients.
In Paris, in 1958, she befriended De
Beauvoir and the philosopher Jean-
Paul Sartre, whom she loved as a father.
She became his lawyer for many years.In 1971, after she had signed De Beau-
voir’s “Manifesto of the 343”, in which
343 women declared that they had had
an illegal abortion, Halimi became
France’s best-known feminist lawyer.
Halimi is survived by two sons from
her first marriage, to Paul Halimi, a civil
servant — Jean-Yves, a lawyer, and
Serge, a newspaper editor — and one
son from her second, Emmanuel Faux,
a broadcast journalist. She and Halimi
divorced. Her second husband, Claude
Faux, was Sartre’s secretary and died in
2017 after they had been together for 60
years. “He was the most feminist man
I’d ever known,” she told Le Monde.
Regretting not having had a daugh-
ter, she was profoundly invested in her
granddaughter, Maud. Excessively so,
according to Maud’s parents, who pre-
vented the two from interacting for
several years. Halimi sued, successfully,
to be allowed back into Maud’s life.
She wrote a dozen autobiographical
books in French. The last of them, A
Fierce Freedom, is due to be published
this month.Gisèle Halimi, lawyer and politician, was
born on July 27, 1927. She died on July
28, 2020, aged 93Halimi in 1978. She inspired legal reformROGER VIOLLET/GETTY[email protected]Nikolai Fadeyechev and Galina Ulanova in Les Sylphides at the Bolshoi in the 1950s. Right: in Spartacus, 1958born in Moscow in 1933,
the son of Boris Fad-
eyechev and Nina Fetis-
ova. “My father, who
was a dancer with the
Bolshoi Ballet, didn’t
want me to be a ballet per-
former, because he felt it was
too difficult,” Nikolai once
said. “But my mother, who was
also a Bolshoi dancer, had the
idea that I should dance. She
said we had to show my father
that I could do it.”
His earliest memories were
of being taken to the Bolshoi
Theatre. “The music, the
costumes and the dancing
touched my imagination,”he said. “It was very exciting for me.” He
studied at the Bolshoi Ballet School
with Alexander Rudenko and graduat-
ed into the Bolshoi Ballet, where he was
promoted to soloist in 1953. A year later
he danced the leading role of Siegfried
in Swan Lake and in 1959 was a member
of the company’s debut tour of the
United States.
Thirteen years after the Bolshoi’s first
visit to London, Fadeyechev returned
with them to Covent Garden on their
1969 tour, still dancing Albrecht,
though this time with Nina Timofeyeva
(obituary, December 16, 2014). “A stylist
of infinite grace and a superb partner
(those long, slow lifts must be agony to
perform but look effortless), Fadeyech-
ev also has a truly noble presence,”
observed John Percival in The Times.
Other critics described Fadeyechev as
“an aristocratic communist” on
account of his elegant posture and So-
viet passport.
He was married to Irina Holina, who
was also a dancer. She survives him
with their sons, Alexei, who fol-
lowed his father into the Bol-
shoi Ballet, later becoming its
artistic director, and
Alexander, who is also a
dancer with the company.
After retiring from the
stage in 1977 Fadeyechev re-
mained with the Bolshoi as teacher, re-
hearsal director and répétiteur, adored
by his students for his gentle guidance
and impeccable manners.
In 2006 Fadeyechev concluded
that what had most impressed Brit-
ish audiences half a century earlier
“was our ability to suffer on stage, to
bring out human emotions”. However,
with the end of the Cold War and the
increasing internationalisation of bal-
let and other performing arts, he
added a warning: “We are losing [that],
because technical ability has become
more important than acting ability.”Nikolai Fadeyechev, ballet dancer,
was born on January 27, 1933. He
died of heart failure on June 20,
2020, aged 87