Kyra Nijinsky

Kyra Vaslavovna Nijinsky (19 June 1914 – 1 September 1998), was a ballet dancer of Polish and Hungarian ancestry, with a Russian dance and cultural heritage.

In the 1930s she appeared in ballets mounted by Ida Rubinstein, Max Reinhardt, Marie Rambert, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor.

[2][9][10][11] While living alone in Berlin in 1931, Kyra began dancing in Ida Rubinstein's ballet company, directed by her aunt Bronia.

Backstage, she became a close friend of another dancer Vera Zorina, who later wrote about her, "Kyra came from an exotic, unhappy world.

Antony Tudor, for his new ballet The Planets, cast her as the Mortal, born under the sway of the mystic figure Neptune, so that she longed to unite herself with the Infinite.

About Kyra critic Arnold Haskell wrote in 1935, "She is a dancer who understands, whether instinctively or otherwise, how to use dancing in order to express her emotions."

[1][19][20] On 20 April 1936 at the Coronation Church in Budapest Kyra married Igor Markevitch, a Ukrainian composer and conductor who had been with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes during the late 1920s.

The film, directed by Robert Dornhelm, offers a view of her life, her pursuit of a career in dance.

Sturdily built and full of exuberance, she has the most engaging smile and what must be her father's eyes, of an unusual grey-green, or is it green-brown?

"Kyra turned out to be an unusually attractive child, with curly black hair and 'beautiful green eyes, as strangely fascinating, as oblique as Vaslav's very own.'