We’re having the time of our lives!
Uplifting story of Dirty Dancing stage stars who fell in love in real life too
THEY fall in love on stage every night as the stars of Dirty Dancing.
Now Michael O’Reilly and Kira Malou have told how they fell for each other in real life.
The couple play lovers Johnny Castle and Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman in West End musical Dirty Dancing – roles memorably played by Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the hit 1987 movie.
The storyline tells how the daughter of a doctor falls in love with an older dancer at a US holiday camp in 1963.
The movie’s best-loved moment is when Swayze lifts Miss Grey above his head to the song (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life. O’Reilly, 25, and Miss Malou, 27, originally met in an audition room for a 2018 UK tour of the show. He told the Mail: ‘When you start doing the show and you’re spending every day with each other, you’re falling in love on stage. It was a natural process of falling in love [in real life].’
He added: ‘We have an interpretation that no one else has ever found because no one else has ever done that. When you go and watch the show you really are watching a once in a lifetime thing.’
O’Reilly, from Cornwall, landed the role after leaving a performing arts college in Kent. He and Miss Malou, from Southampton, who has been dancing since she was four, have moved in together in London but have found a good ‘balance’ to ensure they also have time for themselves.
She said: ‘It would be very intense to spend our days together, work together falling in love, then go home together.
I am falling in love with this man every single night so I have to really be in that zone of telling the story truthfully because I have to look as if I’m seeing him. I can’t look as though “Urgh, Michael! Here he comes.”’ The pair have built up a legion of devoted fans and delight audiences with the iconic lift at the end of the show. Miss Malou recalled the first time they practised the big lift, saying: ‘Michael is 6ft 2ins... I went up and just didn’t stop going up. I was like “Do not drop me!”.’
Thankfully, the lift has never gone wrong - so far.
O’Reilly said his glamorous job feels like ‘cheating’. He explained that is mother is a nurse and ‘she doesn’t get applause every night for doing her job.’ He added: ‘She’s saved hundreds of lives and I’m just dressing up in a costume telling a story.’
Dirty Dancing enjoyed a successful UK tour in 2021 and was a West End hit this year. It returns to the Dominion Theatre in London from January 21.
‘Lift has never gone wrong’