Britain’s Ballerina
Darcey Bussell
Her career makes a fascinating story. Born in London, spending part of her childhood in Australia, Bussell showed aptitude for football, gymnastics and swimming. She was endowed with all the physical gifts one expects in a dancer - those long legs, elegant feet, and expressive arms! - but only started ballet lessons at the age of 13. On top of her natural gifts it was sheer hard work and determination that made her the youngest-ever Principal Dancer with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. She was spotted by Kenneth MacMillan, who cast her as the lead in his 1988 ballet, The Prince of Pagodas - and the rest, as they say, is history.
Bussell lifts the curtain on life as a modern prima ballerina, telling the story of her rise to fame and revealing the physical and psychological demands of her profession. She lights up the screen when she appears in performance with partners like Jonathan Cope, Edward Watson, and, in Kenneth MacMillan's elegiac Requiem, Cuban sensation Carlos Acosta.
She also reflects, during the film's glimpses into the ballerina's off-stage life, on the electrifying stage partnership she enjoyed for many years with Igor Zelensky.
Winner of the Prix de Lausanne in 1986, Dance and Dancers Magazine's Dancer of the Year in 1990, her ballet reputation was demonstrated in Britain by her selection in 1990 to perform for the Queen Mother's 90th birthday. She was awarded an OBE in 1998, and made a CBE in 2006 (which in terms of British honors, is only one tiny ballet step below being appointed a Dame). There was glamor as well: nominated by People magazine as one of 1994's fifty "most beautiful people in the world," portrait in the UK's National Portrait Gallery, a guest on the last flight of Concorde. When she officially retired from the stage in 2007 it was headline news.
But the diva has reinvented herself as author of the "Magic Ballerina" series of children's books, and as what The Times of London calls an "eco-mom": she, her husband, banker Angus Forbes, and young daughters, Phoebe and Zoe, have moved to Australia, where they live in an environmentally-friendly home fitted with solar panels, on a plot of land where they can grow their own food.
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