Marie-Jeanne was only 20 when George Balanchine created two of the finest pure-dance ballets of all time around her special gifts. They were both premiered for a six-month good-will tour of Latin America by American Ballet Caravan, commissioned by the US Government. Ballet Imperial, danced to Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto, was a transposition of the old Russian grandeur into a Western context. The ballerina part has been reputed the most difficult in Balanchine's repertory, built on the brilliance, speed and clarity of Marie-Jeanne's technique (she enjoyed even the double sauts de basque that killed many dancers), but for her even the opening cadenza was difficult only for “the crazy things” that he threw in.

Made at the same time, Concerto Barocco demanded chastely refined precision of feet and legs from its almost all-female cast to match Bach's Double Violin Concerto. Marie-Jeanne recorded that the version danced today has been simplified - slower, with less sharpness and flow. There used to be, according to the ballet master John Taras, “odd hips, odd turned-in things” and a jazzy syncopation. All who saw Marie-Jeanne dance these ballets agreed that she was superb in them.

Born Marie-Jeanne Pelus in 1920, the only child of an Italian chef and a French milliner, she described herself as “a real New Yorker, a Latin from Manhattan”. She dropped her surname for the stage, apparently thinking ballet-goers might find it awkward. She had no encounter with ballet until New Year's Eve, 1933, when her mother ignored her wish to see a Walt Disney film and literally dragged her, she said, to see de Basil's Ballet Russe. A programme containing Les Sylphides and Balanchine's Cotillon, with Danilova and the so-called baby ballerinas dancing, convinced her at once that “that was it”, and two days later she entered Balanchine's School of American Ballet, then just opening.

Pierre Vladimirov, who had been the Prince in Diaghilev's Sleeping Princess and later Pavlova's chosen partner, was her favourite teacher, and years later she still used his sequences when she taught. Her first walk-on part, as the Child in Errante, already had the administrative director Lincoln Kirstein asking her mother: “Did she ever have acting lessons?”

While still a tiny student she also appeared in Mozartiana. Unlike most of Balanchine's later favourites, she was not tall, but her long feet and legs hid her shortness. Dancers called her “Paddlefoot Pelus”.

Contrary to the custom of merely “marking” or sketching out the dances in rehearsal, she always tried to work full-out because “that's where you test your technique” - doubtless explaining how when she later danced in Symphony in C she did entrechat dix, a step rare even among virtuosi and virtually unheard of from a woman.

From 1937 to 1940 Marie-Jeanne's chief opportunities came in the infrequent performances of Ballet Caravan, a company formed by Kirstein to develop American choreographers. Its biggest hit was Billy the Kid, in which the double role of Billy's mother and dream sweetheart was created for her. Its choreographer, Eugene Loring, also featured her as Columbine in Harlequin for President and as the South Sea Lady in Yankee Clipper. Another important creation for her was the Rich Girl in Filling Station by Lew Christensen, for whom she also played the title part in Pocahontas and the Debutante in his comedy, Charade.

Through these and other roles, including guest appearances with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (where Balanchine reworked his Serenade, giving her all the solos), she was ready when Balanchine made his big roles for her. For the Latin American tour he also made a closing Divertimento to Rossini's music for Marie-Jeanne and Fred Danieli, with a Tyrolean solo for her, composed in ten minutes, which brought the house down and had to be encored. Danieli said of Marie-Jeanne: “She was a fantastic allegro dancer, but also good in adagio. That's what made her great. Nobody could touch her.”

In around 1940 Marie-Jeanne lived for a while with Balanchine, between his marriages to Vera Zorina and Maria Tallchief, but it was a brief relationship because she, unlike him, wanted children. Her own marriage in 1942 to an impresario, Alfonso de Quesada, took her to Argentina, and for a time, while she was trying for

a child, she did not dance. They divorced in 1947, after having a daughter. Meanwhile, she had resumed performances with various companies, notably as ballerina of the Marquis de Cuevas's Ballet International, where she danced a new ballet devised by Salvador Dalí, Colloque Sentimental, with choreography attributed for some reason to her partner André Eglevsky, although it was actually by Balanchine.

Her last stage appearances were with the newly formed New York City Ballet before retiring - very young - in 1948. Thereafter she sometimes rehearsed young dancers in her former roles, most notably Concerto Barocco for the Balanchine Foundation's film archive. She wrote and published (in 1941 and 1948) two books for young people, novels about dancers. A second marriage which followed in 1957, to Dwight Godwin, a photographer and film-maker, took her to Texas where she took an active part in helping the Gainsville Ballet - and even herself went back to class at an advanced age to keep the feel of it.

Marie-Jeanne died in Austin, Texas, where she was living in a retirement home. Her second husband died in 1983; she is survived by two sons from their marriage and a daughter from her first.

Marie-Jeanne Pelus, ballerina, was born on August 12, 1920. She died on December 28, 2007, aged 87