'' Olga Spessivtseva was born in
Rostov-on-Don, the daughter of an opera singer and his wife. After her father's death, she was sent to an orphanage with theatrical connections in
St. Petersburg, a center of culture. She entered St. Petersburg's
Imperial Ballet Academy in 1906, where she was a student of Klavdia Kulichevskaya and later of
Yevgenia Sokolova and
Agrippina Vaganova. After graduating in 1913, she joined the
Mariinsky Theatre company, where she was promoted to soloist in 1916. She was a romantic dancer and according to some, she was uniquely suited for roles such as
Giselle and Odette-Odile in
Swan Lake and quickly became one of the most popular dancers in the company. Spessivtseva had experienced periods of
clinical depression as early as 1934, when she showed signs of mental illness in Sydney and needed hospitalisation. In 1937 she left the stage due to a nervous breakdown. She did some teaching, then briefly returned to performing, making her farewell appearance at the Teatro Colón in 1939. That same year, she moved to the United States, where she taught and served as an advisor to the Ballet Theatre Foundation in
New York City. She suffered another nervous breakdown in 1943, for which she was hospitalized. The
BBC produced a short programme about her life in 1964, and two years later
Anton Dolin wrote a book about her. Both works are titled
The Sleeping Ballerina. Expert dance writers have described her as "the greatest of Russian
ballerine at this period", and "The supreme classical ballerina of the century". In 1998, Russian choreographer
Boris Eifman made her the heroine of his ballet,
Red Giselle. ==See also==