Biography

Mother, with Peter Finch, of a son.

Ballerina.

She moved to Paris with her mother in 1926. Her father was already there, seeking work as a journalist with a Russian newspaper. In 1928, after her father took her to see Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, she told her parents she wanted to be a dancer. She trained at the studio of Olga Preobrajenska, a former dancer of the Russian Imperial Ballet. While still in her teens, she danced with companies that formed in Europe after the death of Diaghilev. She toured with Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Les Ballets 1933, Colonel. W. de Basil's Ballets Russes and finally to Australia in de Basil's Monte Carlo Russian Ballet in 1936.

Her marriage to Peter Finch ended after she discovered his affair with Vivien Leigh, who was married to Laurence Olivier. Ironically, when Tchinarova and Finch met for the first time, the ballerina was sitting by a swimming pool, reading "Gone with the Wind", the movie version of which features Leigh's best-known performance.

In the early 1960s, she became an interpreter, first at a British Trade Fair in Moscow, then for several dance companies.