Ralph Fiennes Plans Film About Bisexual Dancer Rudolph Nureyev

With Coriolanus and The Invisible Woman Ralph Fiennes has shown he doesn’t just have talent in front of the camera, he’s a pretty good director too. While Fiennes also starred in both those movies, he now plans to make a film he won’t also appear in, about legendary dancer Rudolph Nureyev.

Screen Daily says that it’s not known what the exact plot will be, but that ‘the film is understood not to be a biopic but instead charts a specific incident in the life of the celebrated dancer who defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him.’

He’s certainly a figure who did plenty of things you could make an interesting movie about, not least his defection and a dancing career that made his one of the most famous ballet practitioners in history. It may also take in his sexuality. Nureyev largely had relationships with men (although he did date women as a young man, and there are rumours about his seducing prominent ladies during the height on his fame), mostably with fellow dancer Erik Bruhn, with whom he had an on-again-off-again relationship for over 25 years. However if the movie takes place before Nureyev defected that relationship won’t feature, as they didn’t meen until Rudolph went West. It’ll be interesting to see how his sexuality features in the movie.

Sadly the great dancer died of AIDS in 1993, aged 53.