Gelsey Kirkland

Gelsey Kirkland (born December 29, 1952) is an American ballerina. She received early ballet training at the School of American Ballet. Kirkland joined the New York City Ballet in 1968 at age 15, at the invitation of George Balanchine. She was promoted to soloist in 1969, and principal in 1972. She went on to create leading roles in many of the great twentieth century ballets by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor, including Balanchine's revival of The Firebird, Robbins' Goldberg Variations, and Tudor's The Leaves are Fading.

Balanchine re-choreographed his version of Stravinsky's The Firebird specifically for her. She left the New York City Ballet to join the American Ballet Theatre in 1974 as a principal dancer.Kirkland appeared in the dance role of Clara Stahlbaum in Mikhail Baryshnikov's 1977 televised production of The Nutcracker, which Baryshnikov also acted in as the titular Nutcracker/Prince. She left the American Ballet Theatre in 1984. Kirkland's first autobiography, Dancing on My Grave (1986), written with her then-husband Greg Lawrence, was a memoir chronicling her artistic transformation from George Balanchine's "baby ballerina" to one of the more acclaimed ballerinas of her generation. The book describes in detail her struggles with her domestic family problems, sibling rivalry, anorexia, bulimia, plastic surgeries, drug addiction, her quest for artistic perfection, and her complicated love affairs with Mikhail Baryshnikov and numerous other men, most of whom she encountered in the ballet world. Dancing on My Grave was dedicated to Joseph Duell, a dancer with the New York City Ballet who had committed suicide that same year, in 1986, in hopes "that the cry for help might yet be heard".Kirkland's second autobiography, The Shape of Love (1990), dealt with her move to England to dance with The Royal Ballet, her attempts to get a fresh start with her first husband, and her return to American Ballet Theatre with a clean slate and a renewed outlook on life. She danced Romeo and Juliet with Anthony Dowell and Sleeping Beauty with Stephen Jeffries.

In 1993, Kirkland and her husband eventually collaborated again on a children's book, The Little Ballerina and Her Dancing Horse about a little girl who loves ballet but might not be able to keep dancing if she keeps riding her horse Sugar.