Top 10 Greatest Ballet Dancers of All Time

Margot Fonteyn was the Royal Ballet's defining ballerina for four decades, and her partnership with Rudolf Nureyev beginning in 1962—when she was 42 and he was 24—produced performances of *Giselle* and *Swan Lake* that remain the interpretive standard today. Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956, she later received the rare title prima ballerina assoluta, awarded only five times in ballet history. Frederick Ashton built 10 major roles for her, including the 1958 *Ondine*, which required 85 counts of breath control in a single solo. Her international tours with Nureyev in the 1960s sold out 95% of venues, cementing her legacy as a global icon.

As principal dancer of the Ballets Russes, he combined a 180-degree split leap with an expressive intensity that contemporaries struggled to describe rationally. His choreographic debut, L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), caused a scandal that put ballet on European front pages, and his Rite of Spring (1913) sparked the most notorious riot in performing arts history, now regarded as the founding document of 20th-century modernism in dance.

Sylvie Guillem became the Paris Opera Ballet’s youngest-ever étoile at 19 and proceeded to demolish every assumption about classical ballerina technique. Her extraordinary flexibility—effortlessly raising her leg to 180 degrees—combined with intellectual rigor that drove collaborations with William Forsythe and Akram Khan across four decades.

Carlos Acosta rose from a poor Havana neighborhood to become the Royal Ballet’s most electrifying principal dancer from 1998 to 2016. Acosta’s autobiography and biopic brought ballet human stories to new audiences, and his return to Cuba in 2016 founded Acosta Danza, blending classical and contemporary forms.

Natalia Makarova defected from the Kirov Ballet in London in 1970 and joined American Ballet Theatre, where her interpretations of Giselle and Manon redefined dramatic expressivity. Unlike Sylvie Guillem’s athletic flexibility, Makarova fused Stanislavskian psychological depth with supreme classical purity—her Giselle universally regarded as the interpretive benchmark of the 20th century. She later staged her own productions of La Bayadère and Swan Lake for major companies worldwide, earning a 1984 Tony Award for On Your Toes after performing 450 shows on Broadway.

Erik Bruhn was the Danish noble of classical ballet -- a technician of such purity and elegance that Mikhail Baryshnikov later named him the greatest male dancer he ever saw. Principal dancer of the Royal Danish Ballet and frequent guest with American Ballet Theatre throughout the 1950s and 60s, his Albrecht in Giselle and James in La Sylphide set the interpretive standard for Romantic-era roles that persists to this day. He was also an influential director, leading the Royal Swedish Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, where he died in 1986 after significantly raising the company's international profile.

Alessandra Ferri trained at the Royal Ballet School and became a principal dancer of the Royal Ballet before Kenneth MacMillan -- who called her the greatest dramatic ballerina of her generation -- brought her to American Ballet Theatre in 1985. Her portrayals of Juliet, Manon, and Juliet in his choreography became definitive: dancing of such emotional transparency that audiences consistently reported weeping without knowing why. She retired in 2007 but returned in 2013 and continued performing into her late fifties, her artistic authority undiminished by time in a manner virtually without precedent in the art form.