Natalya Sedykh

As a very young girl, she was enthralled by a television broadcast of figure skating.

[1] A 1962 televised version of The Dying Swan brought her to the attention of director Aleksander Rou,[2] who cast her as the ingenuous heroine Nastyenka in his 1964 fairy tale film Jack Frost, and also in his 1968 film Fire, Water, and Brass Pipes.

She toured internationally in The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, The Seagull, and Anna Karenina, in which she danced alongside Maya Plisetskaya and Māris Liepa.

Her former boyfriend, a fellow artist from the Bolshoi, was so consumed by jealousy that he followed her to Leningrad and attempted to strangle her, then threatened her with a knife.

In 1990, Sedykh joined the company of Mark Rozovsky's Nikitsky Gate Theater in Moscow, where she continues to perform.