INTERVIEW

Dancing queen

As she sets off on tour, Strictly Come Dancing head judge Shirley Ballas talks about dating apps, her secret to staying slim and why she loves sharing her home with her 88-year-old mother

by KATHRYN KNIGHT

photography ELISABETH HOFF

‘I’ll never look at myself like a star – I’ll always be a worker and a grafter’

‘I didn’t know if I wanted the Strictly job because of the intrusion, people selling stories, the criticism…’

In the eight years she’s been on the judging panel of Strictly Come Dancing, Shirley Ballas has had to endure all sorts of flak.

It took a long time for the 65-year-old dance champion to find a way to manage what sometimes felt like incessant criticism. There is, however, one critic she cannot – and would not want to – escape: her 88-year-old mother Audrey, with whom Shirley shares her south London home. ‘I walk in through the door after a show and there she is in this little old pink dressing gown which has got to be as old as she is, and I can see from her face she’s disagreed with my marks,’ she laughs. ‘Even though I’m 65 I can still feel like a young girl again.’

She wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. As becomes abundantly clear during the course of our chat, Audrey is both Shirley’s best friend and her role model, an indefatigable presence who, despite having battled cancer and a list of health challenges, ‘just keeps going, dining, cooking, cleaning’.

‘She never complains,’ says Shirley. ‘She’s of the school that you just get on with it.’

It was Audrey who raised Shirley on a Merseyside housing estate. And while Shirley travelled with her dance career, it was Audrey who helped raise Shirley’s son Mark, from her second marriage to American ballroom dancer Corky Ballas (her first marriage, to dancer Sammy Stopford, ended when she was just 22).