For nearly a quarter of a century Nadia Nerina was one of the most popular ballerinas of her time, largely as a leading dancer with the Royal Ballet but also in guest appearances for many other companies, and on concert tours.

Her special gifts were immortalised in the role of Lise which Frederick Ashton created for her in his production of La Fille mal gardée. He made such dazzling use of her virtuoso technique, with its speed and lightness, that when first given in 1960 he was asked whether he thought anyone else would be able to dance it; luckily the challenge of the role has compelled brilliance in younger dancers (although the amazing jumps have sometimes been played down). Moreover, Ashton and Nerina achieved a charm and sense of comedy, both in the individual character and in her relationship with others, that have made the ballet one of the most touching extant.

She was born Nadine Judd in Cape Town in 1927, was brought up in Bloemfontein and made her stage debut there in opera as Cio-Cio San’s baby when a touring production of Madam Butterfly visited. She began dancing on a doctor’s recommendation after twisting her ankle when she was 8. Her main teachers were Eileen Keegan and Dorothea McNair in Durban and she later recognised how excellent they were; good enough for her to win a bursary for studies overseas. Immediately after the Second World War it was difficult to get on a ship, but in October 1945 her father managed to secure her a passage to England.

In London she went first, as advised, to the Rambert School, where Marie Rambert gladly accepted her, offered her a room in her own home and wanted her for the Ballet Rambert. But a message arrived from home that she must try for the Sadler’s Wells School, where again she was accepted at once, and was given a walk-on role as one of Aurora’s nurses in The Sleeping Beauty on the opening night at Covent Garden. Ninette de Valois wanted her to take the stage name Nadia Moore, but the young dancer insisted on Nerina as being a South African flower and also her own late mother’s name.

There soon followed a place in the new junior Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, where she had the first of the dozen or so roles that would be made specially for her, as the Circus Dancer in Andrée Howard’s Mardi Gras, and also her first newspaper review, for a solo in Les Sylphides. Her fellow South African and friend John Cranko gave her a leading part in his ballet Children’s Corner. In her holiday that year and the next she went to Paris and studied with the former Mariinsky ballerina Olga Preobrajenska.

She was transferred to the senior Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, where her first created role was the Spring Fairy in Ashton’s Cinderella; it was a surprise to her that after she had listened to the music he asked what it made her think of and then based her solo on her comments. Nerina, crisp and brisk, could hardly have been more different from Ashton’s great lyrical muse Margot Fonteyn, but Ashton used her repeatedly in his new ballets (Homage to the Queen, Variations on a Theme by Purcell, Birthday Offering) and also cast her in the leads of some existing works — Cinderella, Ondine and eventually Sylvia, which occasionally surprised but also delighted her.

Other choreographers who used Nerina in creations for the Royal Ballet included de Valois in Don Quixote, as a serving wench; Kenneth MacMillan as the Beauty in Noctambules, his first production at Covent Garden, about a demonic hypnotist, and later in his Shakespeare ballet Images of Love; and Robert Helpmann in the title role of Elektra. When Erik Bruhn mounted the showpiece duet from Bournonville’s Flower Festival at Genzano he danced it with Nerina, and she had great success also, although not as first cast, in Leonide Massine’s Mam’zelle Angot and George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial.

When Peter Darrell was commissioned by the Sunderland Festival to make a new work with his Western Theatre Ballet and a guest star he chose Nerina to dance the lead in Home, with a plot by the playwright John Mortimer about life in a mental home. Amazingly, she fitted perfectly into the company’s dramatic style. And of course she danced all the Royal Ballet’s big classics, starting with Coppélia and going on to Giselle, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, which she found hardest of all.

This repertoire won her what was only the second invitation to a British dancer to go as a guest star to Russia, for Swan Lake in Moscow and Giselle in Leningrad, in each case winning special admiration from local dancers for her willingness to work until the last minute rehearsing to fit into a production which differed from the one she knew.

In Swan Lake, incidentally, she once found the excuse to show off which, she wrote, “if it was naughty was also great fun”. This was just after Rudolf Nureyev had danced in the Royal Ballet’s Giselle and inserted a series of entrechats-six, which shocked many dancers and fans. In amusing retaliation, Nerina one night, knowing that Nureyev was in the audience, substituted 32 entrechats-six (not usually a woman’s step) for her featured 32 fouettés in the “Black Swan” sequence. Nureyev must have taken it well because a little later he danced with her in the Laurencia pas de six which he mounted for television — a medium in which Nerina had been one of dance’s pioneers, appearing in six programmes between 1957 and 1965.

Before the last of these Nerina had already substantially retired from the stage, hoping (vainly, as it turned out) that she and her husband Charles Gordon could start a family. Her final role was Clorinda in a danced production of the opera Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Leo Kersley and Janet Sinclair at the Snape Maltings to mark the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth.

It should be noted that whenever she received payment for a gala Nerina passed the fee on to the Sadler’s Wells School or, when it was founded, the Ballet Benevolent Fund. Other indications of her generosity are the statue Zemran on the bank of the Thames by the South Bank, which she gave to the Greater London Council, and a cast of Anna Pavlova’s head which she presented to the dance collection of the New York Public Library.

She also helped to collate a book, Ballerina, bringing together portraits and impressions of her career, combining her own memoirs with accounts by many of her partners which reveal the truly warm affection with which they remembered working with her.

Nerina had long suffered from anaemia. She is survived by her husband.

Nadia Nerina, prima ballerina, was born on October 21, 1927. She died on October 6, 2008, aged 80