Staying En Pointe: An Exclusive Interview with Darcey Bussell

The first time the BBC asked Darcey Bussell to become a full-time judge on Strictly Come Dancing, she turned them down. The then recently retired Royal Ballet star had guested on the panel for a month in 2009 but, she admits, “I remember being terrified! They also asked me to perform a jive at the same time, so I had to come on and do that. I wasn’t worried about the audience — I was more worried about the judges.” Bussell received the invitation in 2011  when she was living in Australia but admits  she declined. “It was quite scary,” she explains.  “It was amazing to be asked, but I felt it really wasn’t for me, it was too much.” However,  when Strictly approached her again a year  later, Bussell had a change of heart. “I said to my husband Angus, I’ll really regret this if I don’t do it. So I just jumped at it.” Bussell was to become a permanent judge on the show from 2012 to 2019, lending an unprecedented (and since unequalled) dash  of class and sparkle to the proceedings. “I loved it,” she tells me when we meet backstage at Covent Garden. “I think for me what was magic about being on a show like that was  you felt part of a company again.”

If it was Strictly that made Bussell a 24-carat household name, it was her work with her original company that ensured her a glittering place in dance’s history books. Over her 20-odd years with The Royal Ballet (19892007), she became the most celebrated British-born dancer of her generation, famed for her lofty, athletic physique and physical brio, marvellous musicality, total commitment to character and undeniable glamour. Since Bussell’s departure from The Royal Ballet on a remarkable night in June 2007, with waterfalls of flowers cascading from the upper circles in her honour after a pitch-perfect performance in Kenneth MacMillan’s Song  of the Earth, she has done anything but sit around. Strictly duties aside, she has — among too many other ventures to list — toured with her own show, Viva la Diva, founded the charitable, now chiefly schools-orientated Diverse Dance Mix programme, and become both president of the Royal Academy of Dance (2012–present) and one of The Royal Ballet’s most cherished guest coaches.

Appointed DBE in 2018, Bussell has been married to Australian banker Angus Forbes since 1997 and is also the doting mother of two girls: Zoe (21) and Phoebe (23). Only this spring, she swelled her CV still further, becoming an ambassador for Angela Rippon’s nationwide initiative, Let’s Dance, to get grown-ups off their backsides. Bussell’s career reads like such an unstoppable torrent of success that one instinctively imagines her as a four-year-old who saw The Nutcracker, decided then and there what she wanted to be, and coasted  from then on. It was not quite that simple. Born in London in 1969, she went first to the regular Fox Primary School in Kensington, and then to Arts Educational stage school a few miles west in Chiswick. It was not until the age of 13 that Bussell joined the Royal Ballet Lower School (aka White Lodge), in Richmond Park. And, even then, she wasn’t sure that the dance discipline was for her. “When I joined,” she says, “I was far behind everybody else. Physically, I had the attributes, but I was very loose, floppy and uncontrolled, and not strong.”

Had she reached her full 5ft 7in by that point? “No,” she says. “I was quite an average height. My first year was a big struggle, and I thought, wow, how am I ever going to catch up? And it was an awful kind of weight on my shoulders. This was my choice — my mother didn’t want me to go... I’ve got to make this work! So it took a good year, until I was 14, that I felt I was on a par with everybody else. I know everybody associates me with always having been this strong dancer, but I wasn’t. I was very weak, with limbs all over the place. “I didn’t shoot up until I was about 16, at the end of White Lodge. And that’s when I found my strength.”

It was also when things started to snowball for Bussell in the most astonishing way. Having joined the Upper School (then in Barons Court), she was given the lead in the annual school performance at Covent Garden, in Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto. Although only 17, she was a knockout and soon caught the  eye of none other than MacMillan himself.  She was just 19 when, dauntingly, the genius behind Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling decided to make his new full evening ballet Prince of the Pagodas for her; and just 20 when, on the opening night in  1989, after just a few months with The Royal Ballet, she was made a principal dancer. But Bussell’s and MacMillan’s professional relationship was soon cut cruelly short. In  1992 — backstage at Covent Garden, during a performance of his dark-as-night Mayerling — he died of a heart attack, aged just 62. It was a colossal blow for his new muse, who in fact had been dancing in that evening’s show —  and yet, Bussell’s career continued to go  from strength to strength, and the great man remains a crucial figure in her life. For one thing, she is currently coaching two lead couples in The Royal Ballet’s 60th-anniversary revival of his Romeo and Juliet (we meet between rehearsals). For another, when I  ask her if she has a desert island pick of the dozens of roles she has performed, it is to that same ballet that her thoughts go.

“A lot of the Balanchine comes naturally to me — that physicality, that attack — but they’re not always my favourite roles. I liked the parts that challenged me,” she says, “or that people didn’t see as ‘me’. So, I suppose something like Juliet, because I was the tall, athletic dancer,  so how could I be the fragile, naïve girl? I knew I had to deceive my director and everybody and make them believe that I could do this.” Speaking of “tall and athletic”, it is often  said that this is very much the direction in which ballet dancers in general have been heading in recent years. Over the remarkable f ive-decade span of Bussell’s involvement  with The Royal Ballet, is this a change she has noticed in those around her? “Well,” she says, “I think the physicality has changed. When  we were ‘going through’, we didn’t have  any nutrition knowledge. Now, there’s an understanding of what’s going to get you through a ballet and going to help you repair quickly. I mean, we just thought carbohydrates were the thing you had to have. And that’s all wrong! Now, it’s protein, protein, protein.”

Certainly, if anyone in Britain knows how to look after themselves, it is Bussell. Every bit  as unaffected and engaging in person as you would hope, she is also in truly fantastic shape, as good as 55 (she turns 56 on 27 April) can ever have looked. How, I wonder, does  she do it? “I focus on my every day,” she says, “doing things that get me out of breath, instead of being a gym bunny, which I don’t think I ever will be. I just do my pilates. I’ll get on a bike, I’ll always walk up the escalators  or walk up the stairs instead of getting a lift.” As our interview comes to its close, I wonder, on a comparable note, if Strictly —  the show that in 2016 turned a certain  recent Labour Shadow Chancellor into an outrageous Gangnam Stylist — has perhaps had a similar effect on the rest of the nation. Has it encouraged us all to move more? “Oh gosh, totally!” Bussell replies instantly. “I mean, the number of times I’ve been asked to go to the House of Commons because they do a Strictly dance-off there...” Really? “Yeah,” she says, “the MPs. That’s what we forget, that in most institutions they’ll have a Strictly party  of some kind. And they were like, ‘Please could you come and judge us?’ And so, I found myself going to the House of Commons to  see a whole lot of MPs, or civil servants, doing their ballroom.” Did any stand out? Is she even allowed to say? “Well,” she replies, diplomatically but  with a big, mischievous laugh. “We had Ed Balls, didn’t we?”

See what events are running at the Royal Ballet & Opera this year and purchase tickets via rbo.org.uk.

Mark Monahan is Chief Dance Critic of The Daily Telegraph.