Osato, Sono, 1919-2018

Sono Osato (大里 ソノ) was a groundbreaking Japanese-American dancer and actress, who joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and later performed with Ballet Theatre, and appeared on Broadway, creating roles in the musicals One Touch of Venus and On the Town.

She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the oldest of three children of Shoji Osato (1885–1955) and Frances Fitzpatrick (1897–1954). In 1925, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where her father opened a photography studio. In 1927, when she was eight, she and her sister accompanied their mother to Europe for two years; while in Monte Carlo, they attended a performance of Cléopâtre by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, which inspired Osato to start ballet classes when she returned to Chicago in late 1929. She was accepted as a ballet student by Adolph Bolm and continued with Berenice Holmes, who took over Bolm's Chicago classes when left for California. Holmes arranged for Osato to audition for the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo while they were on tour in Chicago.

Osato began her career at the age of fourteen with Wassily de Basil's Ballets Russe de Monte-Carlo. The youngest member of the troupe, their first American dancer, she also became 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 because 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 Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), where she danced roles in such ballets as Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire and Bronislava Nijinska's The Beloved.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Osato was encouraged to change her name to something more "American," and, for a short time, she used her mother's maiden name and performed as Sono Fitzpatrick. At around the same time, her father was arrested and detained in Chicago under the United States government's Japanese American Internment policy. In 1942, when the Ballet Theatre toured Mexico, Osato was unable to join the tour since Japanese Americans were barred from leaving the country, and she had several months without work. She was unable to perform in California and other parts of the western United States when the company toured there later in the same year, as these states were deemed military areas and were off-limits for people of Japanese descent.

As a musical theater performer, her Broadway credits included principal dancer in One Touch of Venus (a performance for which she received a Donaldson Award in 1943), Ivy Smith in the On the Town, and as Cocaine Lil in the "Willie the Weeper" segment of Ballet Ballads.

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, which starred Frank Sinatra, and made occasional guest appearances in television series, such as The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950).

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 2016, Thodos Dance Company in Chicago presented a dance production based on her life, titled Sono's Journey.

Osato married real estate developer Victor Elmaleh in 1943, and they had two sons.

Osato died at her home in Manhattan on December 26, 2018, at the age of 99.