She performed with ballet companies
Ballets Russe de Monte-Carlo and the
American Ballet Theatre. As an actress, she starred alongside
Frank Sinatra in the film
The Kissing Bandit. Osato began her career at the age of fourteen with
Wassily de Basil's
Ballets Russe de Monte-Carlo, which at the time was the world's most well known ballet company; she was the youngest member of the troupe, their first American dancer and their first dancer of Japanese descent. De Basil tried to persuade Osato to change her name to a Russian name, but she refused to do so. costume, 1930s As a musical theater performer, her Broadway credits included principal dancer in
One Touch of Venus (a performance for which she received a
Donaldson Award in 1943), Ivy Smith in the original
On the Town, and Cocaine Lil in
Ballet Ballads. Following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Osato was encouraged to change her name to something more "American", and for a short time she used her mother's maiden name and performed as Sono Fitzpatrick. In 1942, when the Ballet Theatre toured Mexico, Osato was unable to join the tour as Japanese Americans were barred from leaving the country, and she had several months without work. She was also unable to perform in California and other parts of the western United States when the company toured there later in the same year, as these states were deemed military areas and were off-limits for people of Japanese descent. In 1980, Osato published an autobiography titled
Distant Dances. In 2006, she founded the
Sono Osato Scholarship Program in Graduate Studies at Career Transition For Dancers to help former dancers finance graduate work in both the professions and the liberal arts. In 2016,
Thodos Dance Company in Chicago presented a dance production based on her life, titled ''Sono's Journey''. ==Personal life==