Sono Osato

Sono Osato (August 29, 1919 – December 26, 2018) was an American dancer and actress whose career spanned ballet, Broadway, and film. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, she was the eldest of three children of Shoji Osato, a Japanese father born in 1885, and Frances Fitzpatrick, a Canadian mother of French-Irish descent born in 1897. The family relocated to Chicago in 1925 to be near Frances's relatives, where Shoji established a photography studio. In 1927, when Osato was eight years old, her mother brought her and her sister to Europe for two years. A performance of Cléopâtre by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, attended while the family was in Monte Carlo, moved Osato to begin studying ballet upon her return to Chicago in late 1929. She trained with dancers Berenice Holmes and Adolph Bolm.

Osato launched her professional career at fourteen when she joined Wassily de Basil's Ballets Russe de Monte-Carlo, then regarded as the world's foremost ballet company. She was the troupe's youngest member, its first American dancer, and its first dancer of Japanese descent. When de Basil pressed her to adopt a Russian stage name, she declined. Over the following six years she toured with the company across the United States, Europe, Australia, and South America, departing in 1941 after concluding that her advancement within the company had stalled. She then spent six months at the School of American Ballet in New York City before joining the American Ballet Theatre, where she performed roles in Kenneth MacMillan's Sleeping Beauty, Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, and Bronislava Nijinska's The Beloved.

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Osato faced pressure to adopt a more anglicized name and for a period performed under her mother's maiden name as Sono Fitzpatrick. Her father was arrested and held in Chicago under the United States government's Japanese American internment policy. In 1942, when the Ballet Theatre toured Mexico, Osato was barred from participating because Japanese Americans were prohibited from leaving the country, leaving her without work for several months. She was similarly prevented from performing in California and other western states when the company toured there later that year, as those regions had been designated military areas closed to people of Japanese descent.

Osato's Broadway career ran from 1934 to 1951 and included a range of significant credits. She appeared in Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the play Peer Gynt, and served as principal dancer in One Touch of Venus, a role for which she received a Donaldson Award in 1943. She originated the role of Ivy Smith in On the Town and also appeared in Willie the Weeper and Ballet Ballads, in which she played Cocaine Lil. Beyond the stage, she appeared on screen alongside Frank Sinatra in the film The Kissing Bandit and made guest appearances on television, including a role on The Adventures of Ellery Queen in 1950.

Osato married real estate developer Victor Elmaleh in 1943, and the couple had two sons. Elmaleh died in November 2014 at the age of 95. In 1980, Osato published an autobiography titled Distant Dances. In 2006, she established the Sono Osato Scholarship Program in Graduate Studies at Career Transition For Dancers, which supports former dancers pursuing graduate education in the professions and the liberal arts. In 2016, Thodos Dance Company in Chicago presented a dance production based on her life called Sono's Journey. Osato died at her Manhattan home on December 26, 2018, at the age of 99. She was the aunt of the installation artist of the same name, Sono Osato.