On TV last night

Warlords (C4)

A GUN-RUNNING adulteress reduced to living in poverty and surviving on cornflakes - probably not the image most people have of Margot Fonteyn. After all, she was the impossibly graceful ballerina who could still dazzle as the teenage Juliet when she was in her late 50s.

But behind the dazzling smile, the stylish beauty and the perfect poise, she cut a tragic figure. Forced to dance to pay the bills long after she should have retired, her late career triumphs were as much a product of necessity than of passion for her art.

While the first part of The South Bank Show's profile of the world's greatest ballerina looked at her life as a dancer, last night's conclusion examined her life as a woman. And it was far from inspirational.

She had told friends she would marry at 35, so when she met Panamanian politician Tito Arias at 34-and-three-quarters, it was love against the clock. Later, she would invest their first meeting with all the romance of love at first sight; the truth seems to be that he couldn't even remember her.

Her marriage does not appear to have been a happy one. Used principally to fund Tito's lifestyle, Fonteyn was also drawn into his more nefarious activities, finding herself spending two nights in jail after being arrested for gun-running. On another occasion, when police boarded their yacht, Tito told her to sit on a wooden bench. Later, he opened it to reveal a stash of hand grenades.

She was said to be on the point of divorcing him when Tito was shot and wounded, apparently by the husband of one of his mistresses. With her husband paralysed, Fonteyn finally got what she craved: to feel needed. She devoted 25 years to caring for a man who seemed to care little for her, but it gave her a purpose, and that was enough.

Her late career flowering was primarily the result of her partnership with Rudolf Nureyev. To fall in love on stage, she told friends, she had to fall in love off stage as well, and she certainly seemed to have loved Nureyev. Although he was gay, he was also sexually voracious, and when Fonteyn had a miscarriage, he was widely assumed to have been the father.

Fonteyn's end was as undignified as her dancing had been elegant. Living on a Panamanian farm without electricity or telephone, she survived by eating breakfast cereal.

Even a benefit at Covent Garden to raise money for the stricken Dame ended up stripping her of her dignity, wheeling her out to perform when she was almost too frail to stand. She died surrounded by bills, her gravestone underneath a washing line.

But Fonteyn was far from the only public figure whose image proved far from reality. Churchill and Stalin presented a united front in the fight against Hitler, at least they did after the Germans invaded Russia, but their public displays of solidarity concealed a bitter fight between those two giants.

Initially, the dispute revolved around strategy: Stalin wanted Britain and the US to invade France in 1942, to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front. Then, it switched to the question of post-war supremacy, Churchill anxious to stop Communist dominance of Eastern Europe, Stalin keen to ensure as wide a sphere of influence as possible.

As last night's Warlords, the third out of four programmes profiling the relationships between Second World War leaders, made clear, the key to victory in this battle was the United States. Roosevelt, opposed to what he saw as British imperialism, and perhaps recognising the emergence of a world dominated by superpowers, in all the key issues came down in favour of Stalin.

Churchill, who once stood alone against Hitler, now found himself demoted to the junior partner in the triumvirate, much to his frustration as he saw British power ebb even in its moment of greatest triumph.

The result was a liberation which brought as much fear as joy to the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Iron Curtain and a continent riven in two for 50 years.