Ekaterina Maximova

Ekaterina Sergeyevna Maximova was born in Moscow in 1939 and trained at the Moscow Choreographic School under Elizaveta Gerdt. She won the All-Union Ballet Competition in 1957 while still a student, graduated in 1958, and was accepted immediately into the Bolshoi Theatre, where Galina Ulanova became an important coach.

Maximova's early career moved swiftly. Dancing Katerina in Yuri Grigorovich's *The Stone Flower* during her first Bolshoi season, she displayed a combination of speed, lightness and characterization that brought rapid acclaim. She joined the Bolshoi's 1959 United States tour and emerged as one of the generation through which Soviet ballet reached a broad international public. In 1964, she won first prize at the inaugural Varna International Ballet Competition.

Her stage partnership with Vladimir Vasiliev—also her husband—became central to both artists' careers. Their work was especially consequential in Grigorovich's repertory: Maximova created Masha in his 1966 *The Nutcracker* and Phrygia in his 1968 *Spartacus*. She excelled equally in nineteenth-century roles such as Giselle, Aurora and Kitri, and worked beyond the Bolshoi with choreographers including Maurice Béjart and Roland Petit. A serious spinal injury in the mid-1970s interrupted her career, but she returned to performance and continued expanding her repertory through stage and television ballets, including *Anyuta*, choreographed by Vasiliev.

In later decades, Maximova gave her last major stage performance in 1999 at a Bolshoi gala marking her sixtieth birthday. She also taught and coached, working at GITIS and later as a répétiteur with the Kremlin Ballet and the Bolshoi, transmitting both classical roles and the interpretive intelligence behind them. She died in Moscow in 2009.