Described as "a dancer of glamour, wit, and striking presence,"[2] she spent ten years with the New York City Ballet (1949–1959), where she created important roles in the works of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.
She was the middle of three children born to her parents, who bore an ancient German surname and who spoke both Afrikaans and English, as did many residents of Pretoria at the time.
There, she attended technique classes in the studio of Igor Schwezoff before going to Paris to study with famed Russian teachers Olga Preobrajenska and Lubov Egorova.
Having grown too tall for the current standard of British ballerinas — at 5'6 1/2" she stood more than six feet on pointe — she auditioned successfully for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, formed in 1937 by Léonide Massine and René Blum after a falling-out with Colonel Wassily de Basil over rights to works created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
She then headed for Australia, via South Africa, to join the Original Ballet Russe, a separate "Russian" troupe formed by de Basil to compete with the company of Massine and Blum.
George Balanchine cast her in the second movement of Balustrade (1941), his first setting of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in D.[7] Once, after the dancers went on strike, Zarova found herself stranded in Cuba.
[11] She was much admired as the Dark Angel in Balanchine's Serenade (music, Tchaikovsky), as Choleric in The Four Temperaments (Hindemith), and as An Episode in His Past in Antony Tudor's Lilac Garden (Chausson).
[12] Her height and statuesque figure also lent much to the effectiveness of the role for which she became best known: The Siren in Balanchine's 1950 revival of his 1929 ballet The Prodigal Son (Prokofiev).
The next year, she and Rosemary Valaire, a close friend, founded the Westside School of Ballet in Santa Monica, California, where she taught in strict accordance with the principles of Balanchine's neoclassical technique.