STRICTLY SCANDALOUS!
What a cad! Before Strictly’s new head judge has even raised her first scorecard, her shameless ex accuses her of taking TEN lovers during their tempestuous marriage. But as we reveal, the truth is even more outrageous...
TWIRLING across the stage in a backless midnight blue dress and silver heels, Shirley Ballas — the new head judge on Strictly Come Dancing — looks every inch the seductive siren. The year is 1992 and Shirley, dancing with her husband of seven years, American-born Corky, is competing in the UK Open Ballroom Championships at Bournemouth Pavilion, a star-studded event the talented pair would later go on to win.
As the music comes to an end, Shirley sashays to the centre of the dance hall and bows as the crowd breaks into rapturous applause. When the noise fades, the compere turns to her and asks: ‘What makes you such a fabulous performer?’
‘I’ve got a good man,’ Shirley simpers, with a coy glance at Corky. ‘He makes me feel fabulous all the time, on and off the floor. He always makes me feel good about myself.’ The feeling, it seems, was not entirely mutual.
For over a decade in the Eighties and early Nineties, Shirley and Corky Ballas dominated the spotlight, winning almost every dance competition going — and the hearts of everyone who saw them — with their slick routines and sizzling on-stage chemistry.
Shirley, a working-class girl from Wallasey, Merseyside, was the darling of the British dance world, admired as much for her fancy footwork as for her sweet, wholesome nature.
But according to a series of tawdry allegations made by Corky, who was married to Shirley for 23 years and was her dance partner for 11, all was not as it seemed.
In a kiss-and-tell interview with a tabloid newspaper, Corky, now 56, has claimed that Shirley cheated on him for 20 years with at least ten different men during their turbulent marriage.
‘It was horrible; she’d be seeing whoever, whenever,’ he told the Sun on Sunday. ‘She’d be at the studios and then disappear with the dancers.’
He claims their relationship broke down within a few years of their 1985 marriage, with Shirley encouraging him ‘go and get yourself a girlfriend’.
When he did, he alleges, she got her own back by seducing a string of younger men and eventually stopped speaking to him entirely. ‘It was like being married to a wall,’ he said.
He also accuses Shirley of violent outbursts of rage, crude chat-up lines and being attracted to him only for his family money (Corky’s father was a wealthy businessman). ‘She used to call me Mr Millionaire,’ he revealed.
The seedy allegations come just six days before Shirley, 57, who replaces former head judge Len Goodman on the hugely popular BBC dance competition, makes her full Strictly debut.
Corky’s outburst risks overshadowing the much-anticipated opening episode of competition on Saturday, and may prompt some fans — particularly those with young children — to switch off in disgust. Strictly does, after all, pride itself on being a familyfriendly show.
For her part, Shirley hasn’t responded to the salacious claims. Yesterday, neither she nor her representatives could be reached for comment.
Earlier in the weekend, she posted some smiling family photos to her social media accounts, having spent the night with her mum, Audrey, and dad, Andrew.
‘What a beautiful evening celebrating my dad’s birthday,’ she wrote. Then, underneath, she added: ‘Forgiveness in life is key. Feeling blessed.’
A subtle response to Corky’s betrayal? Perhaps. She will, of course, have been informed of his interview ahead of its publication.
Until now, the pair, who have a son, Mark (now 31 and a professional on America’s Dancing With The Stars) and divorced in 2007, were apparently on amicable terms.
In a previous interview, Shirley said: ‘Corky was so different. It was all champagne and parties. My head was completely turned. He took risks and grabbed life. He was absolutely bulletproof.’
Yet, in an authorised biography on her website — now removed — Shirley admits there were cracks behind their polished image.
It revealed: ‘Some of Corky’s character traits, Shirley felt, were a great asset to their partnership . . . but in their personal life things were not as happy.’
Corky, who returned to America after their separation, goes much further, apparently lifting the lid on a marriage racked by infidelity, anger and mistrust.
‘I suspected all the way through that Shirley was cheating,’ he claims. ‘Over ten years I’d say there were at least ten men who I thought she was involved with.
‘There were two that I knew of, but there may have been more that I didn’t. It was always the same thing, she would go off and teach them first.’
He says Shirley’s repeated alleged affairs were prompted by him having a fling with an unnamed woman.
‘It was her way of getting back at me, her tit-for-tat. I shouldn’t have cheated, but I ended the affair and I was determined to make the marriage work. I didn’t want to get a divorce . . . while I was reading “How To Save Your Marriage” manuals — I must have read ten to 15 — she was openly seeing other men.’
Corky claims his ex-wife had a photograph of one of her lovers taped inside her diary and would invite others to dinner at the house they shared in London.
‘Most of the time I pretended I didn’t see anything, even though what was going on was practically hitting me in the face,’ he says. ‘I was in denial. When it came to our marriage, I was like a man limping around with a massive tumour on his leg, who just can’t see how bad it’s become.’
Despite her butter-wouldn’t-melt image in the early days, Shirley, it must be admitted, does have form for flitting between men.
Born Shirley Rich, she got engaged to Nigel Tiffany, the British Junior Ballroom Champion and her first partner, aged just 16.
The couple moved from Yorkshire to London to compete, but split up two years later when Shirley was asked to audition as the partner of top-ranking Latin dancer Sammy Stopford.
It wasn’t long before Shirley and Sammy fell in love and got married in 1980; she was 20 and he was 24.
It was thanks to Manchesterborn Sammy, who was utterly devoted to Shirley, that she met Corky. He watched them dance at a competition in Montreal in 1982, and was so entranced he asked the couple to come to Houston, Texas, for private coaching. Corky’s father, George, inventor of the first strimmer lawnmower, was a millionaire and could easily afford to pay for the pair’s expertise.
But Shirley, it turned out, was interested in more than just teaching Corky, a suave darkhaired twentysomething a year her junior, to dance.
‘They came for a week and Shirley would always flirt when Sammy wasn’t around,’ he said. ‘One day before training, I came in an hour early to warm up. I was doing push-ups. I’ll never forget, she came over and whispered in my ear: “Would you like me to get underneath you?”
‘When she went back to the UK, we spoke on the phone every day or every other day for a year and she told me she was going to leave Sammy. Soon after she moved to Houston to be with me.’
A year later, in 1985, the pair wed, but their marriage was blighted by affairs — first Corky, then, allegedly, Shirley time and time again in retaliation. The other parties involved have not been identified.
Their marriage in tatters, both began looking for a way out.
Despite his explosive kiss-and-tell, it was Corky who left Shirley first, in 2003, humiliating her by running off with Kristina Rihanoff, one of his dance pupils and later the ‘Siberian Siren’ from Strictly. He and Kristina — almost 20 years
‘It was her way of getting back at me tit-for-tat’ ‘She’d flirt when her husband wasn’t around’
apart in age — were together for five years. When they split, Kristina blamed her new role on Strictly, which meant she had to move to London from LA, where she had lived with Corky.
Mercifully, she left Strictly in 2015, averting any on-screen fireworks when Shirley takes her seat on the judging panel. Though the pair are once said to have had a screaming row at a BBC party, they have been openly civil, with Kristina one of the first to congratulate Shirley on her Strictly role.
Bizarrely, Shirley remained married to Corky for another four years, filing for divorce on the grounds of ‘irreconcilable differences’ only in 2007.
But, perhaps understandably, she saw his fling with Kristina as a licence to have several dalliances of her own — with increasingly younger men.
First there was Riccardo Cocchi, a six-times Latin dance champion from Italy, 17 years her junior, whom she coached and danced with in 2009. Riccardo called Shirley ‘a great teacher’ and a ‘great and powerful dancer’.
A year later, Shirley struck up a relationship with Russian dancer Yegor Novikov, who, at 26 years her junior, is even younger than her son, Mark.
She is said to have started coaching Yegor as a teenager and the pair got together in 2010 when he was 24. Friends are said to have been ‘shocked’ at the age gap, while Shirley was proud of their relationship. They separated in 2016 and have apparently remained friends.
Shirley seems to think nothing of dating her dance partners — indeed, she deems it inevitable that passion will blossom.
‘If you’re locked up in a room and you’re coming out in your little sensual clothing and men are baring chests and you’re there every week and you have to do romance, it’s difficult not to have chemistry,’ she has said.
‘I mean, we need chemistry on the show. Who’s to say who falls in love with who?’
Which is certainly an interesting perspective on the infamous ‘Strictly Curse’.
But it wasn’t just Shirley’s alleged infidelity which riled her ex-husband.
Corky — who insists she viewed him as just ‘a work machine, a human she had danced with’ — also claims that blazing rows dogged their marriage almost from the start: ‘I remember one occasion we screamed “F*** you” at each other for 15 minutes until someone separated us. Other times, we’d throw dance shoes and sweaty clothes at each other as we were so angry.
‘We argued every single day. We could have a blazing row and come out on the dancefloor and you’d never tell.
‘The arguments gave us the adrenaline to perform. But when you’ve been yelled at for three hours, you don’t want to see them at home. ‘We withdrew from one another and there was no emotional support.’
Shirley’s formidable reputation precedes her on the circuit, where she is known as a ferocious competitor and a demanding mentor.
Derek and Julianne Hough, an American brother-and-sister dance act who lived with Shirley in the UK for ten years as she trained them to become world champions, have made several comments about their time together which hint at her hotheaded nature.
In his 2014 autobiography, Derek detailed an incident in which Shirley slapped him around the face when she caught him smoking.
‘I swear I nearly swallowed my teeth,’ he wrote. ‘If you crossed Shirley, you paid the price.’
Meanwhile, in a magazine interview in 2013, his sister Julianne claimed she was ‘abused, mentally, physically, everything’ during her teenage years.
Shirley was ‘livid’ at the allegations, saying in response: ‘I can show you picture after picture — she had the most privileged lifestyle. She was more than beyond happy.’
Much like others who have clashed with the star over the years, the trio now appear to have made up, with Julianne talking only about how ‘grateful’ she is to Shirley for her help.
Corky, it would seem, is the only one from her past to harbour hard feelings.
Whatever the truth behind these tawdry allegations, the timing of his interview is interesting, to say the least.
While Shirley re-launches herself into the spotlight, by appearing on primetime TV before an audience of millions, Corky’s career is a little more low-key.
He lives in LA, where he’s engaged to Carolina Orlovsky, a dance coach 20 years his junior. These days, he judges professional competitions and teaches, often alongside his fiancée.
One of their recent classes was in a leisure centre in Denver, Colorado. Students paid just $20 for 90 minutes’ dancing.
Little wonder, perhaps, that Shirley prefers to maintain a dignified silence on the whole sordid affair.
‘If you crossed Shirley, you paid the price’