Biography

She was the very last ballerina that George Balanchine picked for the New York City Ballet while he was alive.

Remarked she retired after she was dancing on-stage with girls younger than her daughter and was worried about "needing a plastic hip pretty soon".

As a little girl, she and her older brothers would partake in wrestling, football, water-skiing, basketball and horseback-riding.

She was the youngest to be picked to join the New York City Ballet, at age sixteen.

Won the Capezio Dance Award in 1991 and the Dance Magazine Award in 1992.

You're 16, and you have the most incredible moment ever, and then you have to live and grow up and become the woman you want to be, the mother you want to be. Responsible. Human. I don't think a lot of people who were with Mr. B could grow up. That's why a lot of them became angry or unhappy. I magnify the little time I spent with him to people who knew him. That loss. How do you fill that? What fills that?

["Did people think she was marrying Peter for job security"]: "I was a ballerina before I was with him. Of course, if I wasn't very bright, I'd think, 'Oh, this is going to make my career better.' No. I knew when I married Peter that I had had my career."

"But just the other day she told me: 'You know, Mom, I think I talked myself out of being a dancer because of you. I thought I'd never be as good as you.' And I wanted to cry." --[On her daughter's decision to eschew ballet and become a straight actress]

"There's that devil inside. She already knows how to move to make everybody watch." --Rudolph Nureyev

"The light that she shines is a kind of starlight." --Robert La Fosse