Nina Vyroubova (1921-2007).

France has produced many celebrated soubrette dancers--such as Zizi Jeanmaire and Colette Marchand--but apart from the unique Balanchine-oriented, Franco-American Violette Verdy and the more recently celebrated Sylvie Guillem, only two French prima ballerinas have won international accolades: Yvette Chauvire, born in 1917, and Nina Vyroubova, born four years later in the Crimea. Little known in the United States, Vyroubova was a Romantic dancer whose wraithlike style, gossamer-like jump, and sad oval-shaped face evoked descriptions of Taglioni and Grisi.

She trained with that diamond generation of Paris teachers from the Maryinsky--Preobrajenska, Egorova and Trefilova--and made her debut in 1937 as Swanilda in Coppelia. During World War II she danced in Paris recitals and with small transient companies, but it was in 1945 with the Boris Kochno/Roland Petit Ballets des Champs Elysees where she first made her mark. In 1946, when the company staged a reconstruction of La Sylphide by Victor Gsovsky, she found the role of her lifetime. Serge Lifar designated her an etoile of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1949, where she remained until 1956. The following year she began a five-year stay with Le Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.

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Her only U.S. appearances were as a guest artist with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in its final season, 1961-62. She was a dancer of the greatest distinction. I shall always recall her presence in La Sylphide--which in London, through illness, she only danced a wildly acclaimed once!--her vibrant yet fugitive Giselle, her unearthly self-absorption as the Sleepwalker in Balanchine's La Sonnambula, and, in a quite different vein, her Danilova-like edge and style in Gsovsky's Grand Pas Classique.