My life through a lens

Celebrities share the stories behind their favourite photographs – this week it’s Strictly judge Shirley Ballas, 58

1986

Here’s proof we thought we were having a girl! Corky and I had decorated the room with pink things, thinking a baby girl Elizabeth would be coming home, but my beautiful boy Mark was born. I always say he came out doing the cha-cha-cha – and he’s now a professional dancer. My mother lived with me and

Corky in Houston from when Mark was two until we returned to the UK when he was four, and continued to take care of him until he was 22 and left home. I’m so proud Mark was influenced by us all.

1976

I still owe a debt of gratitude to my dancing partner Nigel Tiffany’s family for taking me in at 14 until Nigel and I got engaged and moved to London two years later. He lived in Shipley, Yorkshire, and it was too far for me to travel on buses from Merseyside to train together, and my mum didn’t have a car. I loved doing competitions in Blackpool, because if you came in the top three you won a prize, such as an electric fire. Nigel is now my financial adviser.

1978

I have big eyelashes glued on here for my first professional photoshoot in Manchester, organised by Sammy Stopford, my then dance partner and future husband. I’d left London and broken off my engagement to Nigel to dance with Sammy. I’d been working at a firm of solicitors in London and I thought my boss was being nice when he let me go to pursue my dancing dreams, but now I realise it was because I was an awful secretary!

1995

All our Christmas cards that year had this photo of Corky, Mark and me on them. Corky and I had had a very successful dance partnership, but our careers were coming to an end. Corky came from a rich family – his father invented a strimmer called the Weed Eater – but by the time we returned to the UK in 1990, business wasn’t going so well and money was tight. We had to start again from nothing, renting a flat in south London, and I would sit on the stairs in dance studios, waiting to take classes that other teachers couldn’t make it to.

1973

Here I am with David Fleet, my first male dance partner. I used to wear fake tan, so at school all the kids picked on me, but I didn’t care. Until I was 13, I’d only done all-girl contests with my partner Irene Hamilton. She loved dancing but wasn’t as dedicated as me. I’ve always been married to the business – that’s probably why I haven’t had a boyfriend for three years.

1967

This is my father Andrew with my brother David and me when I was seven. Dad left home when I was young and it was my mother Audrey who raised us in Wallasey, Merseyside. He wasn’t there at all when I was growing up, and getting into dance, so I never knew what it was like to have a male influence in my life. After my brother David died in 2003, though, I did start to see him a couple of times a year.

1982

This was taken with Sammy Stopford at a dance contest in Canada. Even though

Sammy could afford for me to have dresses made, there was an instinct in me that said, ‘I can do this myself.’ So I stitched the rhinestones on that dress myself, and on Sammy’s shirt, and I did my own headbands and make-up as well as decorating Sammy’s shoes. Just a year or so later, Sammy and I split up and I got together with my second husband, Corky Ballas from Texas.

2017

Fellow Strictly judges Bruno Tonioli and Darcey Bussell are here with me in Blackpool. Bruno is such fun – I’ve known him for ten years, from when I was a trainer on Dancing With The Stars in the US and he was on the judging panel. When I joined Strictly I didn’t know Craig Revel Horwood or Darcey, so I was a bit nervous, but Darcey was very mothering, kind and reassuring, and showed me the ropes, while Craig is an absolute darling and we quickly became good friends.