Alexander Grant was a member of the Royal Ballet for 30 years. Frederick Ashton perhaps best understood Mr. Grant’s unique ability to convey a subtle mixture of comedy and pathos, creating nearly twenty roles for him including Alain in La Fille Mal Gardee, Bottom in The Dream, William Meath Baker in Enigma Variations, Thursday’s Child in Jazz Calendar and Yslaev in A Month in The Country. He also danced the world premieres by John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan. In 1976, Mr. Grant become director of the National Ballet of Canada, adding works by Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Kenneth MacMillan, Maurice Bejart to the repertoire and encouraging the early choreographic efforts by James Kudelka, who now directs the Canadian Company. Since leaving Canada in 1983, Mr. Grant worked with the English National Ballet as a coach and character dancer and staged La Fille Mal Gardee and Façade with companies all over the world including the Royal Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Houston Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet. In recognition of his services to ballet, Queen Elizabeth II made him a Commander of the British Empire in 1965.