Maria Tallchief - Telegraph While at Beverly Hills High School, Maria Tallchief also trained in ballet for five years under the great choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the legendary Nijinsky; Cyd Charisse was a classmate and, aged 15, the two danced Nijinska ballets in the Hollywood Bowl. Nijinska's illustrious visiting colleagues enabled young Betty Marie to go to New York to join the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, then stranded by war in the United States. In 1942, aged 17, she began her professional career, changing her name to Maria Tallchief (she resisted pressure to "Russianise" it to Tallchieva). Two years later, the choreographer George Balanchine joined the troupe, and despite the age gap, Maria Tallchief became his third wife in 1946, when she was 21 and he 42. She admitted that "we saved our emotions for the classroom," and told an interviewer: "I was in the middle of magic, in the presence of genius. And thank God I knew it. Balanchine adored Maria Tallchief's leggy, dark glamour as well as her outstanding musicality, and she became his muse when he founded Ballet Society, the forerunner of the future New York City Ballet. He taught her how to become "more Russian." She shed weight and held herself more haughtily. When New York City Ballet launched in 1948, Maria Tallchief was already recognised as a magnetic talent. Among the many ballets of Balanchine's on which she stamped her charisma and technical brilliance were Orpheus, The Firebird, Scotch Symphony, Allegro Brilliante and his demanding versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. The preeminent contemporary critic Edwin Denby pinpointed Maria Tallchief's virtues as her intensity in grand style and "clear, sure-footed dancing [which] travels through space easy and large." However Balanchine's marriages tended to last only until the next muse caught his eye - Maria Tallchief was cast in ballets alongside a young ballerina who in 1952 would become his fourth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq. Maria Tallchief and Balanchine divorced amicably without disturbing their artistic relationship; the choreographer continued to create masterly ballets for her, and she assumed a worldwide mantle as the epitome of American ballerinadom. In 1952 Maria Tallchief briefly married a pilot, Elmourza Natirboff, before taking for her third husband, in 1956, the Chicago construction magnate Henry "Buzz" Paschen. The marriage lasted 48 years, surviving Maria Tallchief's heated affairs with her celebrated partners, Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev - who themselves went on to become lovers, to her enormous chagrin. She played Anna Pavlova in the 1952 Hollywood film Million Dollar Mermaid, with Esther Williams, and in 1955 was described as the world's highest-earning ballerina. In 1960 she joined New York's other company, American Ballet Theatre, to dance a more dramatic repertoire than that favoured by Balanchine, and led ABT's first tour to Soviet Russia in 1960, partnered by Erik Bruhn. It was then that the pair were first seen by the young Nureyev, and when he defected to the West, Nureyev chose Maria Tallchief as his ballerina for his first American television appearances. On retiring from the stage in 1966, Maria Tallchief settled with her husband in Chicago. She was director of ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago during the 1970s, and founder and co-director of Chicago City Ballet, which ran from 1980 to 1987. In the late 1980s Maria Tallchief's husband was accused of fraud by his sister, a fellow shareholder in the Paschen firm, one of Chicago's major construction companies, and lawsuits continued for the next 10 years. The luxury of Maria Tallchief's lifestyle with Paschen was found to be partly dependent on false accounting, and in 1999 her septuagenarian husband was jailed for two years for tax evasion. He died in 2004. Maria Tallchief won many American honours: the Osage tribe named her Princess Wa-Xthe-Thonba (The Woman of Two Standards), and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She is survived by her daughter, the poet Elise Paschen, and sister, the former ballerina Marjorie Tallchief. Maria Tallchief, born January 24 1925, died April 11 2013