Maria Tallchief, 1925–2013

A noble bearing came naturally to Maria Tallchief. Her great-grandfather Peter Big Heart, an Osage chief, negotiated the tribe’s treaties with the U.S. government, and her father, Alexander Tall Chief, parleyed his oil-rich land holdings in Oklahoma into considerable wealth. At the outset of her professional ballet career, she honored her Indian heritage by refusing to follow other American dancers who took Russian-sounding stage names, and her pride never dimmed. “I don’t mind being listed alphabetically,” she said when the New York City Ballet didn’t give her top billing at the height of her career, “as long as I’m not treated alphabetically.”

Tallchief’s family moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles when Maria was 8, and by age 12, she was studying with famed Russian-trained dancer Bronislava Nijinska, said the Chicago Tribune. “Madame spoke no English, but you could feel her greatness,” Tallchief later wrote. While still a teenager, she traveled to New York and landed a job with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which Russian choreographer George Balanchine joined in 1944. “I never really understood, until I met Balanchine, what ballet was all about,” Tallchief said.

Balanchine, twice her age, surprised her in 1946 by asking her to marry him, and she accepted, said The New York Times. “Passion and romance didn’t play a big role in our life,” she wrote in her autobiography. “We saved our emotions for the classroom.” She was Balanchine’s muse when he launched the New York City Ballet in 1948, creating her signature role the following year for Stravinsky’s Firebird. By 1954, she was one of the most highly acclaimed ballerinas of the era.

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Tallchief later married Chicago builder Henry “Buzz” Paschen, said the Chicago Sun-Times, and after retiring from dancing in 1966 served as director of the Lyric Opera Ballet and co-founder of the Chicago City Ballet. “She raised the bar high,” said her daughter, the acclaimed poet Elise Paschen, “and strove for excellence in everything she did.”