Natalia Igorievna Bessmertnova was for three decades a leading dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, Moscow.

She was born in 1941 in Moscow, where her father was a doctor. Her eminence began, in fact, even before she left the ballet school, when she became the first dancer there to be awarded an A+ mark in the final examination. She was then about 20, went straight into the company and the following year, 1962, was already picked out by spectators on the opening night of the Bolshoi's London season for the lyrical smoothness of her dancing as one of three solo swans in Swan Lake. She was similarly noticed as the Autumn Fairy (complete with prominent solo) in Rostislav Zakharov's production of the Prokofiev Cinderella.

The contrast between these parts indicates how the gently expressive dancing she commanded was backed up by a completely assured technique.

Another role that season was in a duet, Étude, staged by the company's artistic director, Leonid Lavrovsky, with his son, Mikhail, as her partner. Slender and big-eyed, she showed a simple directness in these early assignments that was not always matched in her late career (although the subsequent roles themselves were relevant in that respect).

Only one year later Bessmertnova had her first leading role, the title part in Leonid Lavrovsky's production of Giselle. With the great ballerina Marina Semyonova as her chief coach, Bessmertnova went on to dance all the old classics: Don Quixote, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, besides Fokine's Les Sylphides and Le Spectre de la Rose. When she played the ballerina role in Swan Lake, she differentiated its two aspects, captured swan queen and seductive rival, by giving them each a stylised quality.

She became noted also in modern Soviet ballets, taking over roles that had been originated by the celebrated Galina Ulanova, as the heroine in Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet and as the Polish princess Maria, captured and murdered, in Zakharov's The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. She also appeared as Phrygia, the brave heroine of Spartacus, alternating in the role with her contemporary Yekaterina Maximova (both had supporters who thought each the better), and as the sick Shirin in The Legend of Love, whose life is saved by the sacrifice of her royal sister and the painter Ferkhad whom they both love. The latter work was never brought complete to London, only extracts. These two ballets both had choreography by Yuri Grigorovich, who became director of the company in 1964; Bessmertnova married him in 1968 as his second wife and her second husband.

Unsurprisingly, she now had a series of roles made specially for her. In fact the first choreographer to build a ballet around her had been Kasyan Goleizovsky with Leili and Medzhnun in 1964. Grigorovich, however, featured her in one ballet after another.

She was the Tsar's murdered wife, Anastasia, in Ivan the Terrible (1975, and repeated as a guest at the Paris Opéra in 1976); this was perhaps the most moving of her mature roles. Valentina in The Angara (also 1976) was the heroine of a modern-dress tale that did not survive long in the repertoire. And most memorably, playing to full houses in many countries, she was the cabaret dancer Rita in the highly successful new version of The Golden Age, premiered in 1982 and built around her and Irek Mukhamedov, who both proved vividly dramatic in the ballet. In addition, Bessmertnova took the leading parts in Grigorovich's new versions of The Nutcracker, Raymonda, Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake.

At the Varna international ballet competition in 1965, Bessmertnova won the gold medal. Then, appearing in Paris in 1970, she was awarded the Anna Pavlova Prize. Moreover, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to Soviet ballet over so long a period, she was appointed a People's Artist of the Soviet Union in 1976 and in 1977 was awarded the USSR State Prize, followed in 1986 with the presentation of the Lenin Prize. Many of her performances were recorded on video and DVD, including those in the ballets Giselle (two versions) and Spartacus.

From 1989 Bessmertnova was given a pension from the Bolshoi Theatre, but did not at once stop performing. It was in 1995 that she ceased her connection with the company after leading a one-day strike of dancers protesting against the dismissal of Grigorovich as director.

Thereafter she continued to assist him in his ballet activities, for instance with the annual Benois Dance Award, for which he was chairman of the jury. They moved to Krasnodar in southern Russia where Grigorovich now runs a company that tours widely with his ballets.

Bessmertnova also did some coaching of dancers in her famous roles. For some time, however, she had been unwell, reportedly with problems affecting her kidneys. She is survived by her husband and by her younger sister, Tatyana, who also became a dancer at the Bolshoi.

Natalia Bessmertnova, ballerina, was born on July 19, 1941. She died on February 19, 2008, aged 66