This is taken from The Times, September 21, 2006:

Patricia Foy
November 25, 1922 - July 26, 2006
Distinguished BBC producer who skilfully captured the life and work of Dame Margot Fonteyn

PATRICIA FOY was a distinguished producer for the BBC who brought to all the TV programmes with which she was connected an air of committed enthusiasm. She spent most of her time with the corporation working on the arts, for which she had a deep passion backed by an impressive knowledge.

In the late Seventies she was offered a particularly challenging project: to direct the reticent Margot Fonteyn in the making of two documentaries. The first, The Magic of Dance, (1979), related the history of dance, describing how ballet evolved and chronicling her distinguished years with the Royal Ballet and her partnership with Rudolf Nureyev. The second, The Margot Fonteyn Story, (1989), amounted to a video autobiography. By then Fonteyn was ill, but with subtle direction Foy ensured that the film had pace and showed the ballerina looking radiant. Foy reflected the dancer’s sheer courage and determination to see the project through.

Foy was a talented musician at school and then worked backstage at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in the early Fifties as a stage manager. She joined the BBC in 1959 and directed or produced many of the live programmes that gained big audiences on television. She was particularly associated with Music for You, a series of hour-long programmes that showcased many of the leading concert and opera stars of the day.

Performers such as Joan Hammond, Yehudi Menuhin, Hilde Gueden and Joan Sutherland were particularly popular, and all were treated by Foy with a shrewd blend of diplomacy and good humour.

Foy had her first professional encounter with Fonteyn and Nureyev in 1962 in what has become a historic occasion. The Russian had just arrived in the West, and one of his first engagements in this country was to dance a scene from Giselle with Fonteyn at a charity matinee. Foy captured some of the performance on tape, and even to this day, in rather craggy black-and-white film, the emerging chemistry between the two can be glimpsed.

For the next decade Foy was an important member of BBCTV Arts. As well as doing several outside broadcasts, she produced a delightful documentary on the US soprano Beverly Sills that won Foy an Emmy in 1975.

Fonteyn approached Foy in the late Seventies with an idea for a programme she had put together with her brother, Felix. The Magic of Dance was to tell the history of dance from Fonteyn’s personal perspective, while Foy provided a strong format and a structure that gave the series a dramatic thrust. Each programme demonstrated how classical ballet and dance varies in style and tradition: in the first episode the ballerina talked with much ease about the changes she had seen during her lifetime and chatted with Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis Jr.

Foy was able to shoot sequences worldwide, and encouraged Fonteyn to be as natural in front of the cameras as she had been on stage. The ballerina was known to dislike microphones, and Foy relaxed her and provided some unobtrusive prompts (though few were ever needed).

The clips that Foy showed were archival gems. Apart from contemporary dancers — including wonderful footage of Fonteyn and Nureyev — Foy discovered a clip of the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova dancing a scene from Romeo and Juliet.

A decade later Foy directed Fonteyn’s own story. Again, Foy had scheduled many outside broadcasts in exotic locations. By then, however, Fonteyn was too ill to travel and Foy went with a crew to Panama and filmed the entire programme in Fonteyn’s farmhouse, La Quinta Pata. Cows wandered in and out of shot, and Fonteyn, dressed in a blue-and-white striped top, looked wonderful. The cancer that was giving her so much pain was never in evidence and she delivered the script wonderfully and with apparent ease. With obvious emotion Fonteyn called Frederick Ashton “the greatest choreographer of our time”, and Nureyev summed up their partnership succinctly: “We became one body, one soul.”

In 1990 Foy made an incisive documentary on Nureyev for Oxford Films. This chronicled the star’s mercurial career. Foy graciously interviewed his first teacher in Ufa who was still dumbfounded about his defection: “How did he dare?” she said straight to camera. The programme explored sensitively the complexities of the man, his relationship with Fonteyn, his effect on Western ballet and his total devotion to his art. It made an absorbing and instructive programme and broke away from the stereotypical view of the dancer.

Before her death in February 1991 Fonteyn had given Foy permission to research much of the ballerina’s personal memorabilia at her home near Windsor. A programme was being considered but it was never to materialise. Foy delivered an emotional but charming address about her friend at Fonteyn’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey.

In 1960 Foy married Richard Lavin, who also worked at the BBC. He predeceased her.

Patricia Foy, television producer, was born on November 25, 1922. She died on July 26, 2006, aged 83.