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Before landing her decadeslong role as the grandmother in the baiduhai Charities’ holiday performances of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” Jane Bockman danced with the Chicago Ballet Guild and Lyric Opera of Chicago Ballet and toured the country as a member of Ruth Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet company.

As a Ruth Page dancer, the Aurora native performed on Broadway and on a barge anchored off Navy Pier in a production of “The Merry Widow” during the International Trade Fair in 1960.

“She was a lyrical dancer, wonderfully expressive and very graceful and petite,” said longtime friend Dolores Long, a fellow Ruth Page dancer during the 1950s. “Janey was one of the older dancers, so she’d get the parts requiring a certain amount of maturity, even though she always looked so young.”

Bockman, 96, who also ran a Hyde Park dance school with her late husband, died April 12 at Community Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Naperville from complications related to a fall she suffered two weeks ago.

“There are generations of Chicagoans that will always remember her as the grandmother in the ‘Nutcracker,'” said Long, who with her late husband, Larry, choreographed the long-running ballet. “And she so looked the part. If she wasn’t knitting on stage, she was dancing.”

Born Jane Stevenson in Aurora, Bockman graduated from West Aurora High School in 1938. She worked at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, and took an interest in ballet in her 20s after seeing a performance of “The Waltz King.”

She immediately took to dancing,” said her son, Jeff. “She was the kind of person that worked really hard to be the best at it.”

Bockman started taking lessons, eventually studying at the Hyde Park dance studio of her future husband, Charles Bockman, a dancer whose performance career was cut short after he developed an illness later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis.

The couple got off to a rocky start.

“It was the usual thing,” Bockman told the Tribune in a 1949 story. “We met and fought and he picked my dancing technique apart. My pride was hurt, and then suddenly we were friends.”

The couple was married in 1948. While her husband ran the studio, Bockman danced with several dance troupes in the Chicago area and toured the country with Ruth Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet.

At age 41, she injured her knee while dancing with a male counterpart. “She had her leg up against his chest and was doing a back bend, when she heard her knee pop,” her son said. “Despite the pain, she kept dancing and finished the performance.”

After the injury, Bockman stayed home to care for her husband, who by then was in a wheelchair. After he became bedridden, she took over teaching and ran the studio herself for the next 12 years, until after he died in 1983.

“Jane was a great teacher, enthusiastic and totally nonjudgmental,” said her friend Carlynn Ricks, who took lessons from Bockman in the 1970s. “She loved dance so much, she made you love it, too.”

In 1966, Bockman joined the cast of “Nutcracker,” although she initially felt too young to be playing the grandmother in her mid-40s.

“It’s amazing what a little makeup will do,” her son said with a laugh.

Bockman continued in that role for 30 years, performing at both the Arie Crown Theater and the Civic Opera House, until the show’s final curtain call in 1997.

“She never missed a single performance,” her son said.

Other survivors include three grandsons and two great-granddaughters.

A private gathering will be held.

Joan Giangrasse Kates is a freelance reporter.