Frederick Ashton 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
Sophie Fedorovitch Sophie Fedorovitch Sophie Fedorovitch (; 3 December 1893 – 25 January 1953) was a Russian-born theatrical designer who worked with ballet choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton from his first choreographed ballet in 1926 until her accidental death in 1953. Fedorovitch was born and raised in Minsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus) and studied painting in Kraków, Moscow, and St Petersburg. She migrated from Russia to England in 1920. She was established as a painter until she met Ashton, after which she increasingly came to devote her career to set and costume design. Ashton and Fedorovitch met in 1925, introduced by Marie Rambert,