Sono Osato

Osato died at her home in Manhattan on December 26, 2018, at the age of 99. She was the aunt of the installation artist of the same name, Sono Osato.

In 2006, she set up the Sono Osato Scholarship Program for Graduate Studies at Career Transition For Dancers.

In 1980, Osato published an autobiography titled Distant Dances. In 2006, she founded the Sono Osato Scholarship Program in Graduate Studies at Career Transition For Dancers to help former dancers finance graduate work in both the professions and the liberal arts. In 2016, Thodos Dance Company in Chicago presented a dance production based on her life, titled Sono's Journey.

She later found herself on the HUAC blacklist after addressing a gathering of refugees from Franco's Spain and stopped dancing altogether by the end of the 1950s. Sono Osato spent her remaining years in New York. She was married to the Moroccan architect and entrepreneur Victor Elmaleh.

There were other shows and some television appearances, even a film role in the kitsch musical The Kissing Bandit (1948) with Frank Sinatra. Then, her career took a downturn in the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour. Though her brother served with the U. S. Army in Italy, her father was interned as an enemy alien and Osato herself became the target of racial bias. She was eventually forced to adopt her mother's maiden name and perform as Sono Fitzpatrick. In addition, the federal government barred her from touring with the Ballet Theater in California and Mexico.

Between December 1944 and February 1946, she headlined as Ivy Smith, the original 'Miss Turnstiles', in "On the Town" (the part famously played by Vera-Ellen in the 1949 MGM musical).

Although she never adopted a Russian stage name, Sono Osato made her reputation as a ballerina with Wassily de Basil's Ballets Russes (nicknamed 'Nonotchka' by other members of the troupe). She was born in Omaha, of mixed ethnic parentage: her father Shoji was a Japanese photographer, her Irish-French Canadian mother an aspiring actress of somewhat Bohemian temperament. Strong-willed, (Agnes de Mille described her as "brave and sweet, but nobody's fool"), Osato knew what she wanted to become after seeing Léonide Massine dance in "Cleopatre". After a period of intense training in Chicago, her tutor and mentor (ex-ballerina Berenice Holmes) set up an audition in Monte Carlo and Osato was able to join the Ballet Russe at the age of 14 (at the time, the youngest dancer to perform with the company, paid just $25 a week). Though performing in ballerina roles for six years, she was not promoted to premier danseuse nor did she receive the pay that was consummate to leading roles. Frustrated, she quit and joined the (American) Ballet Theater where she became a star of modern ballet, recipient of a Donaldson Award as best female dancer for her performance in the 1943 Broadway production of "One Touch of Venus" (choreographed by De Mille).

Osato began her career at the age of fourteen with Wassily de Basil's Ballets Russe de Monte-Carlo, which at the time was the world's most well known ballet company; she was the youngest member of the troupe, their first American dancer and their first dancer of Japanese descent. De Basil tried to persuade Osato to change her name to a Russian name, but she refused to do so. She spent six years touring the United States, Europe, Australia and South America with the company, leaving in 1941 as she felt her career was stagnating. She went to study at the School of American Ballet in New York City for six months, then joined the American Ballet Theatre as a dancer. While at the ABT, she danced roles in such ballets as Kenneth MacMillan's Sleeping Beauty, Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, and Bronislava Nijinska's The Beloved.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Osato briefly pursued a career as an actress, appearing on Broadway in Peer Gynt, in the film The Kissing Bandit with Frank Sinatra, and in occasional guest appearances on television series such as, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950).

Sono Osato (大里 ソノ , Osato Sono, August 29, 1919 – December 26, 2018) was an American dancer and actress.

Osato was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She was the oldest of three children of a Japanese father (Shoji Osato, 1885–1955) and an Irish-French Canadian mother (Frances Fitzpatrick, 1897–1954). Her family moved to Chicago in 1925 in order to be closer to Frances' family, and Shoji opened a photography studio there. In 1927, when she was eight, Osato's mother took her and her sister to Europe for two years; while in Monte Carlo, they attended a performance of Cléopâtre by Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes company, which inspired Osato to start ballet classes when she returned to Chicago in late 1929. She studied with prominent dancers Berenice Holmes and Adolph Bolm.