NATALIA BESSMERTNOVA
Ballerina
Natalia Bessmertnova, a ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet known for her lightness, delicacy and Romantic style, died Tuesday in Moscow. She was 66.
Yekaterina Novikova, a spokeswoman for the Bolshoi, announced Ms. Bessmertnova's death to the Associated Press but did not give a cause beyond saying that she had been "suffering from a grave illness." The Russian media reported that Ms. Bessmertnova had kidney trouble.
The Bolshoi's general director, Anatoly Iksanov, said her death was "a huge loss for the Bolshoi Theater and to our whole culture," and declared her "the pride and glory of the company to which she devoted her entire life."
A slight, pale dancer with large eyes, Ms. Bessmertnova was known for a lyricism that gave her dancing a mysterious, almost unearthly beauty. These qualities made her especially notable in the title role of Giselle.
Reviewing the Bolshoi's London season in 1969 for The New York Times, Clive Barnes called Ms. Bessmertnova "the kind of dancer born to dance Giselle.
"She is as fragile as a bird, has a frail, waif-like innocence, and dances with a fey sense of doom," he wrote.
Ms. Bessmertnova, whose mother was a homemaker and whose father was a doctor, was born in Moscow and received early dance training in the children's classes of the Moscow Young Pioneers Palace. Encouraged by her teachers to become a professional dancer, she continued her studies at the Bolshoi's school and entered the company in 1961, making her debut in Chopiniana, a ballet known in the West as Les Sylphides, and one in which she could display her sense of Romantic style.