Vera Zorina, Star of Ballet, Film, and Theater, Dies at 86

Vera Zorina, famous as a star of ballet, film, and theater in the 1930s and ’40s, died on Wednesday, April 9 at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was 86.

Born Eva Brigitta Hartwig to Norwegian parents in Berlin on January 2, 1917, she learned to dance as a child and was already performing professionally by age 7. While in her teens, she was cast in Max Reinhardt’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tales of Hoffman. Moving to London to study ballet, she appeared opposite Anton Dolin in the play Ballerina.

Her name was changed to Vera Zorina by the legendary Léonide Massine, director of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, when she joined that company in 1933. Zorina toured England and the U.S. with the Ballets Russes before leaving the company in 1936. That same year, she starred in the London production of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart-George Balanchine musical On Your Toes.

Impressed by Zorina’s performance in On Your Toes, producer Samuel Goldwyn signed her to star in his 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies, in which she again worked with the great Balanchine. Later that year, Zorina made her Broadway debut in another Rodgers-Hart-Balanchine musical, I Married an Angel, and she married Balanchine in December 1938. While under contract to M-G-M from 1938 to 1944, she appeared in a movie version of On Your Toes and in such other films as Louisiana Purchase and Star-Spangled Rhythm. She attempted to resume her ballet career in 1943 and appeared as a guest artist with Ballet Theater, taking the role of Tepsichore in Balanchine’s Apollo.

Zorina and Balanchine were divorced in 1946. Later that same year, she married Goddard Lieberson, who, as president of Columbia Records, was a major force in bringing the concept of the original Broadway cast album to maturity. Zorina remained wed to Lieberson until his death in 1977; her third and final marriage, to harpischordist Paul Wolfe, came in 1991. In later life, Zorina remained active as a narrator of classical music pieces in symphony concerts and as an opera director for several companies, including the Santa Fe Opera. She became a music consultant and record producer for Columbia in 1978.

Vera Zorina is survived by Peter Wolfe and by one of the two sons from her second marriage, composer Peter Liberson (also of Santa Fe); her other son from that union, Jonathan Lieberson, died in 1989 after a career as a teacher of philosophy. Zorina is also survived by three granddaughters.