“We left Pierre at 4 in the morning,” said his wife, retired principal dancer Jessalyn Thesmar.
“It’s sad. He still had a lot of projects and was writing a book.”
She said that the artist, known in his later years for reviving ballet works in the nineteenth century, died in a clinic in the town of Seine-sur-Mer in southern France after suffering from a poisoning wound.
Born in the French capital in 1932, Lacôte became a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet at just 19 years old.
Since the late 1950s he has worked as a freelance dancer and choreographer.
In 1961, after befriending Soviet-born ballet legend Nureyev while on tour in Paris, Lacotte was among those who helped the dancer escape from KGB agents and seek asylum at the capital’s Le Bourget airport, according to his account in a BBC documentary. .
His role in the famous split is also told in the 2018 biographical film “The White Crow” by British director Ralph Fiennes.
Lacotte, who had an ankle injury, became more and more interested in the archives of the Paris Opera since 1968.
He devoted the rest of his career to reviving forgotten nineteenth-century works in the world’s greatest stages.
It included “La Sylphide”, the first ballet entirely on pointe when it was created in 1832, and the orientalist fantasy “La Fille du Pharaon” from 1862 – the last for a Bolshoi ballet.
The Bolshoi on Monday paid tribute to Lacotte, calling him “a talented man with a generous soul.”
Lacôte’s latest work in 2021 is the production of “Le Rouge et le Noir” based on the 1830 novel by French writer Stendhal. When it opened, it was 89 years old.
