Tanaquil Le Clercq Biography

Tanaquil Le Clercq

French-born, willowy ballerina who frequently and gracefully performed the works of Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine, to whom she was once married. She contracted polio in 1956, at age 27, and became paralyzed from the waist down. In an eerily prescient performance in 1944, Balanchine choreographed a short piece in which he played a character named Polio, and Le Clercq was his victim.