At the age of 16, Mr. Dupond was inducted into the Paris Opera Ballet, and Mr. Bozzoni proposed to enter the Varna competition. After winning the gold medal, he steadily rose to the Paris Opera – although his virtuoso technique and philanthropic style were not to everyone’s taste.
“Of course you don’t want to put out the fire, the furnishings, or the excitement,” said Violette Verdy, then director of the Paris Opera Ballet, upside down in a 1977 interview with The Times, explaining to him that what he sometimes does is like that What is tasteless is that it belongs more to the Moulin Rouge than to the Paris Opera. “
“Because I like him so much,” added Ms. Verdy, “I’m especially tough on him.”
Mr. Dupond’s star quality and charisma made him a crowd favorite even after leaving the opera in 1997. In 2000, after a serious car accident, he had 134 fractures, constant pain, and a morphine addiction that he had to overcome for a year. But he returned to the studio and worked with Mr. Bozzoni to regain his strength. Less than a year after the accident, he appeared in a musical entitled “Un Air de Paris”.
In 2004 he met Leila Da Rocha, a former professional basketball player who had trained as a dancer and choreographer. Although Mr. Dupond was always open about his homosexuality, particularly in an autobiography, “Étoile” (2000), he described their encounter as love at first sight.
Ms. Da Rocha encouraged him to appear on several reality television shows, most recently as a judge on the French edition of Dancing With the Stars. Together they taught and staged works at their dance school in Soissons.
In addition to Mrs. Da Rocha, Mr. Dupond is survived by his mother.
In an interview with the Liberation newspaper in 2000, Mr. Dupond presented his credo as an artist: “To please, to seduce, to distract, to enchant; I feel like I’ve only ever lived for it. “
