(1959); Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty (1963); Mahmene Banu in (1965); Alberto Alonso's Carmen Suite (1967), choreographed especially for her; and Maurice Bejart's Isadora (1976). Among her most acclaimed roles were Kitri in Don Quixote, Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, and The Dying Swan, first danced as a pre-graduate student under the guidance of Sulamith Messerer. A fellow dancer said that her dramatic portrayal of Carmen, reportedly her favorite role, "helped confirm her as a legend, and the ballet soon took its place as a landmark in the Bolshoi repertoire". Her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, wrote the scores to a number of her ballets. Having become "an international superstar" and a continuous "box office hit throughout the world", Plisetskaya was treated by the Soviet Union as a favored cultural emissary. Although she toured extensively during the same years that other prominent dancers defected, including Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Plisetskaya always refused to defect. In 1991, she published her autobiography, I, Maya Plisetskaya. Early life Plisetskaya was born on 20 November 1925 in Moscow, into a prominent family of Lithuanian Jewish descent, most of whom were involved in the theater or film. Her mother, Rachel Messerer, was a silent-film actress. Bolshoi Ballet principal dancer Asaf Messerer was a maternal uncle and Bolshoi prima ballerina Sulamith Messerer was a maternal aunt. Her father, Mikhail Plisetski (Misha), was a diplomat, engineer and mine director; he was not involved in the arts, although he was a fan of ballet. Her brothers Alexander Plisetski and Azari Plisetski became renowned ballet masters, and her niece Anna Plisetskaya would also become a ballerina. She was the cousin of theater artist Boris Messerer. In 1938, her father was arrested and later executed during the Stalinist purges, during which thousands of people were murdered. According to ballet scholar Jennifer Homans, her father was a committed Communist, and had earlier been "proclaimed a national hero for his work on behalf of the Soviet coal industry". Soviet leader Vyacheslav Molotov presented him with one of the Soviet Union's first manufactured cars. Her mother was arrested soon after and together with her seven-month-old baby Azary sent to a labor camp (Gulag) in Kazakhstan for the next three years. Maya was taken in by their maternal aunt, ballerina Sulamith Messerer, until her mother was released in 1941. During the years without her parents, while barely a teenager, Plisetskaya "faced terror, war,