Passage: Remembering Jacques d'Amboise
It happened this past week, the death of ballet dancer and teacher Jacques d'Amboise.
Put into dance class by his mother at the age of seven to keep him off the streets, d'Amboise was just 15 when George Balanchine recruited him for the New York City Ballet.
He performed on its stage for almost 35 years, and in the movies, too, including Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel" in 1956.
Jacques d'Amboise and Susan Luckey in "Carousel":
D'Amboise devoted his later years to giving kids the same chance he had, through the National Dance Institute, which he founded in 1976.
And through the years "Sunday Morning" raced to keep up with him ... from New York City, to rural Maine, and to Roxboro, North Carolina along the Appalachian Trail.
He was motivated, he told us, by one compelling idea: "The arts, all of them, should be part of the curriculum of the schools and should be part of our life – the center of our life, not the periphery," he said in 1980.
Jacques D'Amboise was 86.
For more info:
See also:
- Watch: Jacques d'Amboise starts kids on the right foot ("CBS Evening News," 4/14/10)