Dasha Besshaposhinikova (born May 1979) was an American child actress who portrayed the character of Young Eponine on Broadway in 1991. At the time she was twelve years old and was one of two actresses to have the part in that cast.
Dasha never became successful as an actress, as her last sighting was in 1992 in a regional production The Sound of Music. After this, Dasha decided to leave acting and turned to a career as a biologist instead. This then became a successful field of study for her and she now works at a high school in Connecticut teaching biology to students.
The picture to the right shows Dasha at the age of twelve, when she was working with the cast of Les Miserables. It was not the photograph featured in the programme; it was her school picture of that year.
Personal Life[]
Dasha Besshaposhinikova was born on May 6, 1979 in Moscow, Russia. She has a brother named Andrei who is four years her senior. The pair of them spent their formative years in a small apartment with their grandmother and parents. When she was six years old her family came as refugees to America and they settled in Brooklyn, New York. There, Dasha, who then spoke very little English, became interested in acting when she and her classmates played improvisation games at the end of each school day and was signed up for acting courses. At first she struggled due to her lack of understanding the language, but once she became involved in musical theater she found herself to be much more successful.
She made her stage debut as Marta VonTrapp in The Sound of Music two years later at age eight. She would return, ironically, to make her final stage role playing a different character in the same musical a few years later.
At age fourteen, Dasha decided she'd outgrown acting and abandoned this profession, and turned to biology, which she had found herself becoming passionate about over the past couple years. When she was twenty-two and had finished university, she moved to Connecticut and became a high school teacher, and has been a teacher ever since.
She is now also married and has two sons.
List of Credits[]
- The Sound of Music — Marta VonTrapp (1987)
- Oliver! — Workhouse child (1989)
- Les Miserables — Young Eponine (1991)
- The Sound of Music — Louisa VonTrapp (1992)