Once upon a time at the Royal Ballet there were five young women of outstanding talent and promise, so diversely gifted that we looked forward to 20 years of thrilling performances of every ballerina role in the repertory. The year was 1982, or thereabouts, and their names were Brind, Chadwick, Eyden, Ferri and Tucker. None of them, in the end, completed a career at Covent Garden, and of all the 'might-have-beens' perhaps the most regretted is Briony Brind.

Brind was born in 1960, joined the Royal Ballet School at 11, and was taken into the company in 1978, having picked up the Prix de Lausanne on the way. She was noticed very early on, for the quality of her dancing as well as her appearance - she was tall and thin, with amazingly high extensions (this was long before Guillem appeared on the scene, of course). In 1981 she made her début in Swan Lake, amidst great excitement and showers of flowers - it was a long time since we'd seen a new classical dancer and this seemed the dawn of a new era. She next hit the headlines when she was chosen to dance with Nureyev in his production of the Shades scene from Bayadère, causing television interviewers to start talking about 'another Fonteyn'; and for a few years the company saw her, and used her, as one of their main attractions.

Then, as has happened before and since with other dancers, her popularity tempted the management to cast her in roles outside her range - most spectacularly in Brind's case in the Balanchine repertoire. The beginning of the end of her career was the opening night of a revival of Ballet Imperial. The whole production looked under-prepared, and attracted scathing reviews, and it was quite obvious that Brind was very unhappy in the extremely difficult, fast ballerina role. The experience, and the bad reviews, shook her so deeply that her confidence never recovered. As time went on she was cast less and less frequently. She was finally given Giselle, in which to nobody's surprise she was excellent, but it was too late. In her last year at Covent Garden she was hardly on stage at all, and she made her last appearance with the company in 1991 as a guest in Ashton's Monotones. She danced for a short time with a company called VoltAire, and since then has made occasional appearances as an actress.

Brind was often cast in new ballets, and showed a very different side of her talent in highly dramatic works like Macmillan's My Brother, My Sisters; she was never allowed to do Juliet, though - in those days she was probably considered too tall. There was a rather 'fey' quality to her on-stage character: she could have been the Giselle of her generation, and she would have been wonderful in the full-length Bayadère. She is remembered for the lovely performances of her early years, but her name will also stand as a symbol of unfulfilled potential. {top}