Olga Spessivtseva

Olga Alexandrovna Spessivtseva (; 16 September 1991) was a Russian ballerina whose stage career spanned from 1913 to 1939.

She was considered as one of the finest Russian prima ballerinas by dance writers. After her father's death, she was sent to an orphanage with theatrical connections in St. Petersburg, a center of culture. She entered St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet Academy in 1906, where she was a student of Klavdia Kulichevskaya and later of Yevgenia Sokolova and Agrippina Vaganova.

After graduating in 1913, she joined the Mariinsky Theatre company, where she was promoted to soloist in 1916. She was a romantic dancer and according to some, she was uniquely suited for roles such as Giselle and Odette-Odile in Swan Lake and quickly became one of the most popular dancers in the company.

Spessivtseva had experienced periods of clinical depression as early as 1934, when she showed signs of mental illness in Sydney and needed hospitalisation. In 1937 she left the stage due to a nervous breakdown. She did some teaching, then briefly returned to performing, making her farewell appearance at the Teatro Colón in 1939. That same year, she moved to the United States, where she taught and served as an advisor to the Ballet Theatre Foundation in New York City. She suffered another nervous breakdown in 1943, for which she was hospitalized.

The BBC produced a short programme about her life in 1964, and two years later Anton Dolin wrote a book about her. Both works are titled The Sleeping Ballerina. Expert dance writers have described her as "the greatest of Russian ballerine at this period", and "The supreme classical ballerina of the century".

In 1998, Russian choreographer Boris Eifman made her the heroine of his ballet, Red Giselle.