Photo by Ruby Washington

Georgina Parkinson, a ballet mistress and coach at American Ballet Theatre whose compelling stage presence and brooding mystery had made her a bright young star of Britain’s Royal Ballet in the 1960s, died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 71.

I remember viewing a rehearsal in the American Ballet Theatre studios with David Hallberg and Michelle Wiles (who were working on phrases from Don Quixote)–Ms. Parkinson was the artistic coach. She gave Ms. Wiles advice that stayed with me well after I left the studio, “Whatever you’re feeling in your gut, show that to the audience. Show them your love for dance.” It was so simple, and so brilliant. I am among the many that will miss her presence in the world.

As reported by Anna Kisselgoff in The New York Times:

The cause was complications of cancer, said her son, Tobias Round. Ms. Parkinson lived in Manhattan.

Although her training was in the Royal’s textbook classical style, Ms. Parkinson made her breakthrough in “Les Biches,” an experimental work of 1924 revived for the Royal in 1964 by Bronislava Nijinska.

A dark-haired beauty of striking femininity, Ms. Parkinson nonetheless captured the strong androgyny of the central figure, the Girl in Blue. Coached for weeks by Nijinska, she was widely acclaimed for her unsettling portrayal in the ballet’s commentary on social and sexual mores.

By her own account, Ms. Parkinson was more at home in 20th-century narrative ballets than in the 19th-century classics: she was Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” and danced the title role in “Raymonda,” in which Clive Barnes, writing in 1969 in The New York Times, called her “golden and glowing.”

Georgina Parkinson was born in Brighton, England, on Aug. 20, 1938. As a child in a convent school, she took a ballet class every Tuesday. Noticing her talent, the school’s nuns suggested to her parents that she pursue further training. After studying with a local teacher, she was admitted to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet school and joined the Royal in 1957.

Despite her respect for the classics, she found her best opportunities in new works. She was in the original cast of Frederick Ashton’s pure-dance “Monotones I” and showed off her dramatic side in his “Enigma Variations,” inspired by the composer Edward Elgar.

Kenneth MacMillan created the role of the Austrian archduke’s mother for her in “Mayerling” and cast her in many of his other ballets. Her Juliet in his “Romeo and Juliet” in New York in 1968 was a stricken heroine, doomed from the start.

In 1978 Ms. Parkinson was invited by Nora Kaye, a former Ballet Theater ballerina, to teach company class for Ballet Theater. By then, Ms. Parkinson had begun to perform character roles, which she continued to do later at Ballet Theater. In 1979 she returned for a year to London to be with her family.

Besides her son, Tobias, of London, who is married to Leanne Benjamin, a Royal Ballet ballerina, Ms. Parkinson is survived by her husband, the photographer Roy Round; a grandson, Thomas; and a sister, Maureen Seiger, of Tel Aviv.

In 1980 Ms. Parkinson returned to Ballet Theater as ballet mistress and continued in that role until recently. This fall she was asked to coach the actresses Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in a new Darren Aronofsky film, “Black Swan,” a thriller set in the world of New York City ballet.

Julie Kent, the Ballet Theater principal who worked most closely with her, said on Friday that Ms. Parkinson had helped her “develop my physicality to the point where I was able to express what was inside of me to a larger audience.”

“I learned everything from her,” Ms. Kent said.