ANTONIO GADES achieved international fame as the genius of Spanish dance in the 1980s with the unexpected success of the film version of his flamenco adaptation of Lorca’s Blood Wedding.

But his journey from the harsh realities of life under Franco as the son of a defeated working-class republican to the privileged life of a celebrity could not have been more accidental, and he remained a convinced communist until his death.

He will be remembered as the great reviver of the native art of flamenco, stripping away the tinsel and frills draped upon it by the dictatorship as an ersatz version of Spanish culture, and returning it to its elemental roots.

His greatest choreographical stage works, including Carmen and Blood Wedding, were turned into films by Carlos Saura; he also starred in the films.

Gades’s hungry, chiselled features and smouldering eyes brought him the kind of rave reviews which today are reserved for Joaquín Cortés.

He leapt from the tablaos flamencos of Madrid to find acclaim at La Scala, Milan, and the Metropolitan in New York. He toured the world ceaselessly with his own dance company — which at its height had 42 dancers — as well as directing the Spanish National Ballet.

He was also unstintingly generous to his beloved Cuba, collaborating on a near-permanent basis with Alicia Alonso, the grande dame of Cuban ballet. Last year he combined his two greatest passions outside of dance by sailing in his yacht Luar 040 from Spain to Havana. Last month he was in Cuba for the last time to be presented by Fidel Castro with the island’s highest honour, the Order of José Martí.

He was born Antonio Esteve Ródenas in 1936, as the military uprising took hold in Spain and began a bloody three-year civil war. His father, a labourer, volunteered in the communist October Battalion to defend Madrid and he uprooted his young family from their native Valencia.

Growing up on the losing side, the young boy never calmed the anger which consumed him upon having to leave school at the age of 11 in order to help to support his family.

He began dancing “out of hunger” after a series of dead-end jobs as messenger and photographer’s assistant when a neighbour convinced his mother that his talent for dancing — thus far only expressed to the accompaniment of a street organ while trying to impress the girls — was real.

To his eternal fortune at the age of 16 he was spotted by Pilar López, the famous dance company director, who immediately told him he was destined for greatness. She gave him his stage name of Gades and took him around the world in her company for almost a decade.

At the start of the 1960s he struck out on his own, moving to Italy and collaborating with Giancarlo Menotti on Carmen. He made the astonishing black-and-white flamenco film Los Tarantos with the director Francisco Rovira Beleta, and in 1963 formed his first dance company.

A decade later he brought Blood Wedding to the stage. It was a revelation. Gades returned his dancers to their basics, spurning the gaudy flamenco costumes for authentic peasant dress. He gutted flamenco of its bad taste and strove to release its essence.

“I’m not a folklorist but I studied folklore as a poet studies grammar,” he once explained. “A poet searches for the word and if it doesn’t exist he creates it. My idea was to do something more with that folklore, not steal it from the village and prostitute it, but to gather up its essence and do something else, tell a story through movement.

“In the end, movement is primary. And from there, with literature, music, customs, costumes, lights, we see how to tell stories.”

In 1975 Gades was in Bologna applying his make-up before a benefit concert for the Communist Party when news reached him of the last five executions under the Franco dictatorship. “I felt like a coward,” he said, explaining his decision to dissolve his company. He didn’t perform for years, until his Cuban friends persuaded him to return.

The film versions of his choreographies — a trilogy directed by Carlos Saura of Blood Wedding, Carmen and Bewitched Love — consolidated his reputation, but he gracefully bowed out of the world of dance when his body told him it was time. That gave him more time to indulge his lifelong love of the sea.

In the 1990s he began his long battle with cancer. He subjected himself to repeated operations and radiotherapy, losing most of his stomach, liver and intestines in the process. “The only sadness of dying has nothing to do with not being able to dance, but not being able to go out sailing again,” he said.

He believed that he had finally conquered his illness when he set sail for Havana last year. He died after a brief final illness in Madrid’s Gregorio Marañon surrounded by his family.

Antonio Gades, dancer, was born on November 14, 1936. He died on July 20, 2004, aged 67.