Dancers: Albertina Rasch - a.k.a. Ballett

Max Pollak

American dance choregrapher and ballet dancer Albertina Rasch was born in Vienna in 1891. She studied at the Vienna State Opera Ballet, and then traveled to New York, where she became lead ballerina at the New York Hippodrome in 1911. She formed the Albertina Rasch Girls dance troupe and the Rasch Ballet, and became a leading Ziegfield performer. She soon transitioned to Broadway production, working on the choreography for major musicals such as "Jubilee", "The Three Musketeers", "Show Girl", and more

Her time on Broadway honed her multi-faceted expertise, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, she and her husband, composer Dimitri Tiomkin, moved to Hollywood to pursue careers within their respective fields in film. Rasch soon established herself as a leading supervisor for dance choregraphy, working with leading Hollywood performers Fred Astaire, Jack Benny, Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, and more. She died in California in 1967.