Moscow, Feb 19: The Russian prima ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova, a leading star of the Bolshoi Theatre for three decades, has died aged 66 after a long illness, the company said on Tuesday.
"She died in a Moscow hospital after a long and difficult illness," the Bolshoi press service was quoted as saying by the Ria Novosti news agency.
Born in Moscow on July 19 1941, Bessmertnova trained at the Bolshoi ballet school in Moscow, graduating with the highest possible grade, an A+, a first in the institution's history.
From the 1960s she became one of the Bolshoi's top stars, interpreting all the roles in the classical repertory and winning the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union's top distinction, in 1986.
Bessmertnova was prima ballerina for the Bolshoi from 1963 to 1995, and also worked as a teacher in the final years of her career.
Her husband was the ballet-master and choreographer Yuri Grigorovich, who survives her. He directed the Bolshoi during her career and notably designed the highly-successful ballet "Ivan the Terrible", in which she starred in 1975, and which toured in the West.
In his final years at the Bolshoi, which coincided with the break-up of the Soviet Union, Grigorovich came under fire for what critics saw as the conservatism of his artistic choices, and in 1995 he resigned in protest at changes being made to the theatre's management.
His wife and other dancers then took part in a brief strike to protest at the way he had been treated, and at interference in the running of the venerable theatre by the government of then-president Boris Yeltsin.
Following the protests, Bessmertnova herself resigned from the Bolshoi, declaring that she "refused to be a witness of the death of this treasure of Russian art."
During her long career, Natalia Bessmertnova also starred in a series of successful films of classical ballet.
Bureau Report
