Washington, the National Theatre, a Wednesday night in 1987. The house filling for a revival of Sweet Charity, the band warming, the usual small commotion of a show about to start. Bob Fosse died that evening, just before the curtain went up. The company played the performance and were told afterwards, which is the kindest order anyone could have arranged it in, and nobody arranged it.

What stays with me is how much of that famous style began as a dancer solving his own body. The bowler hat, because he was losing his hair young. The turned-in knees, the rolled shoulders, the small precise hands doing the work instead of the whole leg. He took what he'd rather have hidden and made it the signature, and then thousands of dancers learned to do it on purpose. There is something very generous in that, whether or not he meant it generously.

He was sixty, and he had already been given about as much as the trades hand out: the Academy Award, three Emmys, nine Tonys, the Palme d'Or. But the thing that lasts is a silhouette you can recognise from the back row with the lights low. Ask a house full of people to picture a hat tipped over one eye and they all picture the same hat.