Kain, Karen, 1951- : Karen Kain was born in 1951. She entered the National Ballet School in Toronto in 1962 and was accepted into the National Ballet of Canada company in 1969. Her first principal role with the National Ballet was in The Mirror Walkers in 1970. The next year, at the age of 19, she danced her debut in Swan Lake and received favourable reviews in the American press. In 1973 Kain and her partner Frank Augustyn were sent to Russia to compete in the Moscow International Ballet Competition, where they won first prize for their pas de deux and where Kain shared the silver medal for women with an Australian dancer. Their success in Moscow made them stars back in Canada and Kain and Augustyn began to receive top billing with the National Ballet.
Kain began dancing with Rudolph Nureyev in 1972, when he came to Canada to mount his production of Sleeping Beauty for the National Ballet. They danced together for the next five years while Nureyev guest-starred with the National Ballet. Kain was invited to join his "Nureyev and friends" tour in 1975, along with Dame Margot Fonteyn and other dancers. Kain performed in 1974 as a guest artist with Roland Petit's Le Ballet de Marseille. Petit choreographed two new ballets for Kain, Les Intermittences du Coeur and Nana. She also danced in his Carmen, which was filmed for television. Kain danced in the 1980s with Eliot Feld's company in New York.
Although she enjoyed an international career, Kain made the choice to remain with the National Ballet of Canada, with which she continues to dance. Kain stopped dancing in 1977 but started again in 1981 with the National Ballet of Canada, where she performed for 15 more years. Kain retired definitively as a professional dancer in 1997-1998. She returned to the National Ballet of Canada in 1998 as part of the senior management team, in the role of artistic associate and succeeded Kudelka as artistic director in 1995. She stepped down from that role in 2021.
Throughout her career, Kain has received many recognitions of her contributions to ballet, including honorary degrees from a number of Canadian universities and the Order of Canada. She was showcased in a number of CBC specials, and has appeared in many televised productions of ballets. A television documentary, Karen Kain: Ballerina (1976), was followed by two more documentaries in 1989 and 1994. Her autobiography, written with Stephen Godfrey, was published in 1994.
Karen Kain is married to the actor-producer Ross Petty.
