Celia Franca

Charismatic dancer, choreographer and teacher who founded the National Ballet of Canada

The world of dance has been a crucible producing visionary and indomitable women founders of what became major classical ballet companies at a time when few women ran any organisations at all, artistic or otherwise. Dames Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert were among the first of these remarkable figures, and Celia Franca, who has died aged 85, the founding artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada and founder of its National Ballet School, learned much from working with both.

Like de Valois, who first recognised Franca's potential not only as a brilliant dramatic dancer and promising choreographer but also as a teacher, organiser and pioneer, Franca combined an unquenchable passion for ballet with the energy, sense of humour and practical savvy required to raise funds, keep her dancers fed and persuade recalcitrant boards of directors. She became what choreographer James Kudelka has called the icon of ballet in Canada.

Born Celia Franks in London's East End to a family that had never heard of ballet, Franca was determined to go on stage from the age of three, when she saw her first film; shortly, she was bossing neighbourhood children into "beautiful performances". She won scholarships to King Alfred school, Hampstead, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she showed precocious talent despite her father's concern that she should stop "this dancing business" because there was no money in it. To prove him wrong, she auditioned for the West End musical Spread It Abroad and, at the age of 14, made her professional debut, handing her pay to her father every week with relish.

In 1936 she joined Ballet Rambert and changed her name to Celia Franca. Rambert herself refused to teach Franca, wanting nothing to do with chorus girls, so she fortuitously became Antony Tudor's protege, dancing An Episode in His Past in Lilac Garden and creating roles in other Tudor works. Her friendship with him later enriched the National Ballet of Canada, on which he set a number of his ballets.

Franca joined Sadler's Wells in 1941, where Robert Helpmann created the roles of Gertrude in Hamlet and a prostitute in Miracle in the Gorbals for her, solidifying her reputation as arguably the company's best dramatic dancer. After the war she left, however, sure she would be intolerably bored by the planned repertoire of three straight months of Sleeping Beauty. Between 1947 and 1951, she performed with the Metropolitan Ballet (where she and Erik Bruhn became friends) and Ballet Workshop. Throughout, she used what she has described as a photographic memory for all parts in the repertoire, an accomplishment that was to prove invaluable in mounting classics and Tudor ballets in Canada. She also began to choreograph, creating Khadra (1946) and Bailemos (1947) for Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet. Also in 1947, she became the first choreographer to be commissioned by the BBC to make ballets specifically for television - The Eve of St Agnes and Dance of Salome.

It was in 1950 that Canadian balletomanes sought de Valois's advice on whether a classical ballet company could be created in Canada. Her now legendary response was "Celia Franca - if you can get her." Franca arrived in Canada in 1951, initially to conduct a feasibility study. Within a few months, however, stating with characteristic directness that "you need me here," she had started to create the company herself. She assembled dancers from across the country, and within a few months was conducting a summer school to provide professional polish and stylistic cohesion to those who would emerge as the National Ballet of Canada in November 1951. Not for the last time, she had done the seemingly impossible.

Until her retirement as a principal artist in 1959, Franca danced leading roles (most notably, Giselle), but she was also known to fill in for injured corps girls. She encouraged Canadian choreographers such as Grant Strate, while calling on friends like Tudor, Bruhn and John Cranko to mount or create ballets, including Bruhn's important productions of La Sylphide and Swan Lake, in which she danced the unfathomable Black Queen. She drew on her formidable memory to remount or reinterpret classics like The Nutcracker, and organised strenuous tours, always with live music, to keep her dancers working. She oversaw the company's move from small theatres to the 3,100-seat O'Keefe Centre in Toronto, where the opening ballet in 1964 was a unique version of Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, in which she performed Lady Capulet. Throughout, as she said with considerable understatement, "it was a fight."

Although what she later called "the Miss Franca persona" terrorised many of her dancers, who hid in washrooms to escape her wrath after a bad performance, Franca had a keen eye for talent, casting the 18-year-old Veronica Tennant as Juliet and offering Swan Lake to Karen Kain in only her second year with the company. She was determined to give the company not merely a Canadian identity but also an international reputation, organising European, Japanese and Latin American tours.

Most controversial was her agreement with impresario Sol Hurok to take Rudolf Nureyev's lavish Sleeping Beauty on tour, with Nureyev as Florimund. The decision aroused cavils in Canada, but Franca saw to it that her Canadian ballerinas, not guest artists, danced Aurora, and young Canadian men shone as the Bluebird. As the dancers acknowledged, Nureyev's presence as example and mentor carried them to new heights.

Franca was particularly proud of the creation in 1959 of the National Ballet School, with Betty Oliphant (obituary, August 2 2004) as its first artistic director, and the mounting of Cranko's Romeo, which would become one of 14 ballets filmed by Franca and the late Norman Campbell.

In 1974, exhausted by constant financial strife, Franca stepped down as artistic director, but this was hardly retirement. She made several extended visits to China to assist in the post-cultural revolution resuscitation of classical dance, and served as co-artistic director of the Ottawa School of Dance, finding great satisfaction in teaching young dancers. She continued graciously to make artistic contributions to the National Ballet and National Ballet School, which last year honoured her by naming its state-of-the-art studio facilities the Celia Franca Centre.

Franca received many recognitions, among them the Molson award, the Order of Ontario and investiture as companion of the Order of Canada. She co-authored The National Ballet of Canada (with Ken Bell, 1979) and is the subject of a documentary, Celia Franca: Tour de Force, by Tennant, in which Franca made a telling and irrefutable declaration: "If I was born to anything, it was to start a ballet company and boss people around. I'll feel it's my company even when I'm in my grave."

At 19, Franca had married fellow Ballet Rambert dancer Leo Kersley, who survives her. Both her second and third husbands, Bert Anderson and Jay Morton, predeceased her.

· Celia Franca, ballet dancer, choreographer and director, born June 25 1921; died February 19 2007