Sulamith MessererThe Russian dancer Sulamith Messerer, who has died aged 95, was the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina for more than 20 years and, as a student, ballerina, teacher and choreographer, devoted her life to classical ballet.
She was an indomitable woman whose tiny frame disguised an extraordinary inner strength and courageous character.
She blended Russian classical schooling and the flamboyant bravura of the Soviet style with her own technical wizardry. She spun fearlessly in multi-pirouettes, leapt with carefree abandon and covered the stage with dramatic flair.
She preferred true-blooded heroines to fairytale princesses, and her interpretation of Jeanne, in Flames Of Paris, won the admiration of Joseph Stalin.
Messerer's life offstage was every bit as dramatic as that of her stage heroines. She was born in Moscow, the sixth of 10 children in the extraordinary family of a Lithuanian Jewish dentist.
Five of her siblings became top exponents in the theatre, film and classical ballet, while her niece Maya Plisetskaya - to whom Messerer gave her first ballet lessons and taught the Dying Swan solo - has also won acclaim as a prima ballerina in her own right.
Messerer entered the Bolshoi Ballet School aged eight and joined the company in 1926. From 1927 to 1930 she held the Soviet swimming record for the 100m crawl, practising before and after her long days at the theatre.
With her razor-sharp memory for learning everyone's roles, and because of her determination not to become "the 32nd swan in the line-up in Swan Lake", she soon found herself taking over from injured ballerinas. She became prima ballerina after two years, dancing all the major roles, but was especially acclaimed as Kitri (Don Quixote), Zarema (The Fountain Of Bakhchisarai) and Lise (La Fille Mal Gardée).
Her fame spread overseas, and in 1933 she and her brother Asaf, later a distinguished teacher, became the first Soviet dancers to be granted permission to perform in western Europe.
In the turmoil of everyday living in the Soviet Union under the terror and at war, Messerer helped others, knowing that her career, indeed her life, could be in jeopardy.
She challenged and defied the KGB several times and once drove a truckload of prisoners across the steppes on a dangerous visit to her sister Rakhil in a prison camp. She so charmed its commandant that permission was eventually granted to transfer her sister to a better location. Later, the commandant received tickets to a Bolshoi performance.
In 1961 Messerer was sent to Tokyo, where she learned Japanese and, in founding the Tchaikovsky Ballet School (now the Tokyo Ballet), was instrumental in establishing classical ballet in Japan. In 1996 Emperor Akihito awarded her Japan's highest civilian honour, the Order of the Sacred Treasure Gold Rays.
In 1980, at the age of 72, when most people might start to take things easy, Messerer bravely chose to defect to Britain with her son.
In Britain and elsewhere Messerer was sought by top ballet schools and companies to teach and coach dancers, including Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Antoinette Sibley and Sylvie Guillem. Even in her 90s, she continued to travel abroad, imparting her prodigious knowledge to new generations and still remembering clearly every nuance of the many roles she had danced.
The diversity of her awards reflected her experience. In the Soviet Union in 1946 she was awarded a Stalin Prize, and in 1962 was made a People's Artist. In Britain she became an OBE in 2000.
In 1947 Messerer married Gregory Levitin, a wall-of-death motorcyclist she met in Moscow's Gorky Park. Their son Mikhail, a renowned dance teacher, survives her.
Sulamith Mikhailovna Messerer: born August 27th, 1908; died June 3rd, 2004