Robbins, Jerome (1918-1998), was an American dancer and choreographer (dance creator). He became well known to dance audiences in 1944, when he created his first ballet, Fancy Free. He achieved more widespread fame as the director and choreographer of many Broadway musicals, including The King and I (1951), West Side Story (1957), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). In these musicals, he blended the acting, singing, and dancing into a unified work of art. Robbins and Robert Wise shared the 1961 Academy Award as best director for West Side Story. Robbins again began to focus primarily on the ballet with his creation of Les Noces in 1965. Many of Robbins’s ballets are based on American subjects. Others are abstract in nature and modern in style. They often include jazz rhythms.
Robbins was born in New York City on Oct. 11, 1918. His real named was Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz. He was a member of Ballet Theatre from 1940 to 1948 and associate artistic director of the New York City Ballet from 1949 to 1959. Robbins became ballet master of the New York City Ballet in 1969 and was ballet master in chief with Peter Martins from 1983 until Robbins’s resignation in 1990. Robbins died on July 29, 1998. The book Jerome Robbins, by Himself was published in 2019. It contains selections from Robbins’s letters, journals, drawings, photographs, and an unfinished memoir.
