‘It takes a woman of my experience to play a virgin,” Sarah Bernhardt once said. “I know just what to leave out.” Her words pivot on the incontestable reality that a performer’s ability to discriminate, to edit, to distill her performance is almost always enhanced by the years, heightening her capacity to simulate the state of youth that becomes even more remote the longer an artist matures.

Shakespeare’s 14-year-old Juliet is probably the youngest of all great tragic heroines in the Western theatrical canon. (Shakespeare actually made Juliet several years younger than she was in the earlier dramatizations from which he borrowed his tale.) While the first interpreter of Shakespeare’s Juliet was undoubtedly an adolescent boy, as was the custom in Shakespeare’s time, she has been played most often in recent centuries by mature women. In 1875, actress Mary Anderson made her stage debut as Juliet at age 16 and went on to an international career.But she was an exception to the rule: Into the twilight of Broadway’s heyday in the 1930s, Juliets were almost always the 40-plus grand dames — Ethel Barrymore, Jane Cowl, and Katherine Cornell.

When MGM filmed “Romeo and Juliet” in 1936, the studio wasn’t worried that the movie camera’s microscopic scrutiny would spoil the believability of its heroine, casting the role with 34-year-old Norma Shearer. (Of course, that she was the wife of studio chief Irving Thallberg may have worked its influence as well.) Audiences supplied the requisite suspension of disbelief, but it may have been the case that they would not have wanted or accepted an actual adolescent in the role. For Juliet’s resolution, passion, and independence all demonstrate a will and courage unusual in someone of any age, let alone a 14-year-old.And the suggestion of sexual activity in a young teenager would not have been palatable to Depression-era audiences.

So consistently had Juliet been played by women much older than she is herself, that when Franco Zeffirelli directed his film adaptation in 1968, audiences were startled to see the two lovers played by actual adolescents. What was gained in realism, however, was not matched by profundity of portrayal.

Today, it seems that that Juliet is at least as often portrayed by a ballerina as by an actress. Since Sergei Prokofiev composed his three act ballet score in the 1930s, virtually every major ballet company in the world has adopted some choreographer’s treatment of Prokofiev’s music. Dancing, rather than versifying, Juliet makes it easier in some ways for an adult woman to convey her tender age as well as her growth to self-actualization. An active ballerina of any age has significantly more physical pliancy and muscular control than most of her contemporaries. And she can use this physicality to suggest the ebullience and vulnerability particular to adolescence. She may also employ her finely disciplined coordination to interject a judiciously controlled note of uncoordination, of adolescent gawkiness.

An actress in her forties is mature; a ballerina at the same age is downright elderly. Yet dancing Juliet in London with the Bolshoi Ballet in 1956, 46-year-old Galina Ulanova took London by storm. “We were stunned by the revelation that was Ulanova,” Margot Fonteyn wrote in her autobiography. Ulanova had long experience with the role; she had danced Leonid Lavrovsky’s heroine at the ballet’s world premiere at the Kirov Ballet in St.Petersburg in 1940 (by 1944, the commissars had transferred Ulanova to Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet). Her ability to seemingly shave decades from her age the moment she stepped onstage was one of the reasons her portrayal inspired such adulation.

But it may be that Ulanova’s triumph — she remains probably the most renowned balletic Juliet of this century — has led to a false paradigm. Do we believe that no ballerina can really do justice to the 14-year-old envisioned by Shakespeare unless she is three decades older than the character she is dancing? Or that unless she can pull off this supreme sleight-of-hand, she is not truly a great artist?

That would certainly be going much too far. Theoretically, a ballerina still at the very beginning of her career could possess the imagination and acting skill to do Juliet justice, but certainly in my experience such fruitions are rare indeed.

It’s true too that a balletic realization of Juliet faces pitfalls equal but different to those confronting a dramatic interpreter. When a ballerina’s technical prowess begins to fail, there is only so much acting, so much intellectual re-creation of youth she can do before her efforts look compensatory to the point of apology: After a certain degree of physical decline, she ceases to become creditable as a balletic heroine. Ulanova triumphed as Juliet in London at age 46, and again in New York at 49, but obviously no one would have known better than the ballerina herself at what physical toll her transformation was achieved, and no one would have been more concerned about the risk of defacing her own legend should her performances diminish. She was reportedly ready to retire several years before the Soviets would allow this international icon to bow out in 1962.

We might look to the years around 30 as an auspicious time for a ballerina to produce a definitive Juliet. That’s often a charmed time in a ballerina’s career, when she is both an experienced artist and usually still at her technical peak. And it’s ballerinas of this vintage that I’ve most recently seen dance the role: Maya Dumchenko at the Kirov, Diana Vishneva and Paloma Herrera at American Ballet Theatre. Each brought her own interpretation and each made that interpretation vital and believable. None of the three seemed inhibited by physical constraints. In them, comprehension of the part and the physical capacity to execute it had meshed ideally.

But we will undoubtedly continue to see Juliet danced by 19-year-olds as well as 46-years-olds, and it certainly is most enjoyable for the spectator not to come to the performance with too many preconceptions. Hard and fast rules, as well as expectations, are death to creativity, and just as different ages bring different capacities to embody Juliet so does each ballerina have the possibility to forge the role anew.