The Real Nureyev is an intensely personal, under-the-skin depiction of ballet’s greatest hero. Written by Carolyn Soutar, who worked with Nureyev at the London Coliseum during the 1980s, this biography focuses a six-year period of his life when his career was drawing to a close and this once phenomenal dancer began to call himself “Old Galoshes,” in recognition of his fading powers. From his close friends we learn of the changes in Nureyev: from a young man eager to learn, searching for perfection in a body he believed to be flawed, to the knowledgeable and difficult superstar that he would become.

Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, yet always deeply human, The Real Nureyev is an intimate insider’s story of what the ballet icon was really about.