Nina Timofeeva

Nina Timofeeva was born in 1935 in Saint Petersburg

Nina Timofeeva was born in Leningrad on 11 June 1935. She studied at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet and graduated in 1953. While still a student, she first appeared on stage in 1951 as Masha in The Nutcracker.

From 1953 to 1956 she was a soloist with the Mariinsky Theatre, and then she joined the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow as a soloist. Her roles included Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, Kitri in Don Quixote and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. From 1966 to 1970 she was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet.

She was first married to Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Her second husband was the composer Kirill Molchanov, who wrote music for some of her ballets. He died suddenly in 1982, before one of her performances of Macbeth.

She stopped performing in 1988 and worked as a choreographer for the Bolshoi from 1989 to 1991. In 1991 she moved to Israel with her daughter Nadya, also a ballet dancer, and later published her memoirs, The World of Ballet. She died in Jerusalem on 3 November 2014 and was buried in the Givat Shaul Cemetery.