Title: Frederick Ashton
Content: from the Royal Academy of Dance in 1959. He was awarded the Freedom of the City of London (1981), and received honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham (1962), East Anglia (1967), London (1970), Hull (1971) and Oxford (1976). Frederick Ashton Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton (17 September 190418 August 1988) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue. Determined to be a dancer, despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert. In 1926

Title: Frederick Ashton
Content: Frederick Ashton Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton (17 September 190418 August 1988) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue. Determined to be a dancer, despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert. In 1926 Rambert encouraged him to try his hand at choreography, and though he continued to dance professionally, with success, it was as a choreographer that he became famous. Ashton was chief choreographer to Ninette de Valois, from 1935 until her

Title: Frederick Ashton
Content: retirement in 1963, in the company known successively as the Vic-Wells Ballet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Royal Ballet. He succeeded de Valois as director of the company, serving until his own retirement in 1970. Ashton is widely credited with the creation of a specifically English genre of ballet. Among his best-known works are "Façade" (1931), "Symphonic Variations" (1946), "Cinderella" (1948), "La fille mal gardée" (1960), "Monotones" I and II (1965), "Enigma Variations" (1968) and the feature film ballet "The Tales of Beatrix Potter" (1970). Ashton was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the fourth of the five children of George

Title: Frederick Ashton
Content: had two subsequent marriages, both to gay Englishmen. As the 1930s progressed, Ashton's career began to extend internationally. In 1934 he choreographed Virgil Thomson's opera "Four Saints in Three Acts" in New York, and in 1939 he created his first ballet for a foreign company: "Devil's Holiday" ("Le Diable s'amuse") for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. He continued to create dances for other forms of theatre, from revues such as "The Town Talks" and "Home and Beauty", to opera, including Clive Carey's production of "Die Fledermaus" at Sadler's Wells, and film, notably "Escape Me Never", another collaboration with William

Title: Frederick Ashton
Content: was immediately determined that he would become a dancer. Dancing was not a career acceptable to a conventional English family at that time. Ashton later recalled, "My father was horrified. You can imagine the middle-class attitude. My mother would say, 'He wants to go on the stage.' She could not bring herself to say 'into the ballet.'" Ashton's father sent him to England in 1919 to Dover College, where he was miserable. Homosexual, and with a distinctly Spanish accent that his classmates laughed at, he did not fit in at a minor public school of the early 1920s. He was

Question: In what country was British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton born?
Answer: Ecuador