Janet Collins.

Janet Collins, dancer, choreographer, and the first African American artist to break the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera died on May 28, 2003, in Fort Worth, Texas. She was 86 and had been in poor health for some time.

Born in New Orleans to mixed-race parents, she grew up in Los Angeles, where she studied with Carmelita Maracci. Ballet was her first love, but when she auditioned for the Ballet Russe, choreographer Leonide Massine turned her down. "I'd have to start you in the corps and paint you white," he told her, "and you wouldn't want that."

In the 1940s, Collins performed with Katherine Dunham, appearing in the film Stormy Weather; formed a nightclub act with Talley Beatty; worked with Lester Horton, Jack Cole, and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren; and received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. She gave her first independent concert in 1957 in Los Angeles.

A triumphant New York debut at the 92nd Street Y followed two years later. In The New York Times John Martin lauded her "rich talent" and "striking theatricality." DANCE MAGAZINE, citing her "quicksilver" dancing, "alive with animal vigor, intelligence, compassion, and wit," named her the season's "outstanding debutante." In 1950 Hanya Holm brought her to Broadway, casting her as Night in the Cole Porter musical Out of This World.

The following year she joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet as a premiere danseuse. Hired at the request of choreographer Zachary Solov, she was the first African American member of the Met company. She remained there until 1954, dancing leads in Aida, Carmen, Samson and Delilah, and La Gioconda. Her partner, Loren Hightower, recalled her "strange, hypnotic" power as a dancer as "absolutely compelling." Because of segregation, Collins was replaced by white dancers when the company toured the South.

She left the stage in the mid-1950s, and began to teach. In 1974, she returned to the limelight in Canticle of the Elements rot Alvin Ailey, and in 1995 she was the keynote speaker at the Eighth International Conference of Blacks in Dance.

Married briefly, she had no children. She is survived by a brother, Ernest Patrick Collins, of Fort Worth, Texas, and a sister, Betty Wilkerson, of Pasadena, California.