Lila Zali, founder of Orange County, Calif.'s most prominent ballet company, Ballet Pacifica, and former lead dancer with Los Angeles City Ballet, died Saturday Jan. 4 of natural causes at South Coast Medical Center in Laguna Beach. She was 84.
Daughter of Russian opera singers was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. After the Russian Revolution, her family moved to the U.S. where her father had a contract to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, but he died en route of typhoid, so Zali and her mother settled in Washington, D.C. There she began studying dance, performed at the White House while still a child, and later studied at the American School of Ballet, then began dancing in New York-based Mordkin Ballet, remaining with it after it became the kernel of the American Ballet Theater in 1940. She later joined the Colonel de Basil Ballet Russe.
In the mid-1940s, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met her future husband, cellist Nicholas Kolia Levienne, and danced in films, served as prima ballerina of the Coronet Ballet and the Los Angeles City Ballet and taught at the studios of renowned dancers Adolf Bolm and Michel Panaieff, where her most famous student was Cynthia Gregory, later a star at American Ballet Theater.
Her husband founded the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society and she opened the Laguna Beach Ballet Studio, then founded Laguna Beach Civic Ballet in 1962. The name was changed to Ballet Pacifica a few years later. The company now has a budget of about $1.7 million and gives about 60 performances a year.
She stepped down as artistic director in 1988 but remained as artistic adviser and continued to teach.
There are no survivors.
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