He was born on 18/04/1940 in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Ballet School with teachers such as Aleksey Yermolayev. Upon graduating in 1958, he became a principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet, where he contributed to highlighting men as classical dancers and embodied the new masculine ideal. He was the first dancer to be awarded the Gold Medal for the World’s Best Dancer. Russian dance critic Fyodor Lopukhov called him the “God of dance”. Numerous roles were created especially for him and he performed them throughout the world, usually partnering with his wife, Bolshoi prima ballerina Ekaterina Maximova. Among the most notable of such roles are those created by Yuri Grigorovich, in his original productions of: Spartacus (Khachaturian), The Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky), Ivan the Terrible and The Stone Flower (Prokofiev), Anyuta (Gavrilin, 1982) and Angara (Eshpay, 1976). Besides his wife, Vasiliev’s famous partners included: Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya, Alicia Alonso, Carla Fracci and Ambra Vallo. He led his entire career in the former Soviet Union. During the Bolshoi Ballet’s visit to New York (1959), Vasiliev and his wife were extolled by American critics. In 1995, following Yury Grigorovich’s dismissal by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Vasiliev was appointed General Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Theater, only to be let off himself in 2000. Since then, he has been choreographing and staging ballet performances around the world. He has received numerous awards by the Soviet Union, France, Lithuania, Brazil, as well as by UNESCO. He collaborated with the GNO once, creating a new choreography for the ballet Don Quixote (2011-12). // Last update of the biography: March 2019 - The list of the productions below will be added soon.