Antony Tudor (born William Cook; 4 April 1908 – 19 April 1987) was an English ballet choreographer, teacher and dancer. He founded the London Ballet, and later the Philadelphia Ballet Guild in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., in the mid-1950s. Early life and education Tudor was born William Cook in East London, and grew up in the Finsbury area. He discovered dance accidentally. Tudor's first exposure to professional ballet was in his late teens when he first saw Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. He witnessed the dancer Serge Lifar of the Diaghilev Ballet in Balanchine's Apollon Musagète in 1928. Later, the Ballet Russes would introduce him to Anna Pavlova, who further inspired his journey into the world of dance. Tudor reached out to Cyril W. Beaumont, the owner of a ballet book shop in the Charing Cross Road district in London, to seek advice regarding training and was instructed to study with Marie Rambert, a former Diaghilev Ballet dancer who taught the Cecchetti method. Career He began dancing professionally with Marie Rambert in 1928, becoming general assistant for her Ballet Club the next year. A precocious choreographer, at age twenty-three he created for her dancers Cross Garter'd, then Lysistrata, The Planets and other works at the little Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and his two most revolutionary, Jardin aux lilas (Lilac Garden) and Dark Elegies, before the age of thirty, himself dancing the main roles. In 1938, he founded the London Ballet with Rambert members, including his future life partner Hugh Laing, Andrée Howard, Agnes de Mille, Peggy van Praagh, Maude Lloyd and Walter Gore. With the onset of World War II, in 1940 he was invited with them to New York, joining Richard Pleasant's and Lucia Chase's reorganized Ballet Theater. Chase's company was later to become the American Ballet Theatre, with which Tudor was closely associated for the rest of his life. He was a resident choreographer with Ballet Theater for ten years, restaging some of his earlier works but also creating new works, his great Pillar of Fire (1942), Romeo and Juliet, Dim Lustre and Undertow, on that company by the end of the war. Retiring from dancing in 1950, he headed the faculty of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, taught at the Juilliard School recurrently from 1950 onwards. He mentored dancers of color and offered weekly classes at the Philadelphia Ballet Guild, which he established in the mid-1950s. Among others,