Bryony Brind was the poster girl for British ballet in the 1980s. Ballerinas at that time were still fashioned in the Fonteyn manner: dark, oval-faced and rather serious. Brind was tall and lithe, with long, graceful arms and a brilliant smile. Her grin beamed out from a VHS tape, Bryony Brind’s Ballet: The First Steps, in which she promised: “It’s fun, it’s for me, it’s for you.”
She looked and felt fresh at exactly the time that audiences were craving something different. Her rise through the ranks of the Royal Ballet was meteoric — she made her debut in ballet’s most challenging role as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake when she was only 21 and still a junior soloist.
“The whole package was there at a