I was there Whitney Houston’s choreographer remembers filming The Bodyguard

Choreographer Sean Cheesman remembers working with Whitney Houston on The Bodyguard (released Boxing Day1992)

This is Whitney and me on the set of The Bodyguard , in which I had a small acting role, but my main job was to actually choreograph the dancing. She was filming the final scene, where her character, Rachel, is at the Academy Awards and her stalker tries to kill her. She’s in that fabulous costume and looks so happy and beautiful. I wasn’t in this scene, so those are my real clothes – and hair! It is all very of its time.

I got into dancing through figure skating. I grew up in Calgary in Canada, where everyone skates. My skating coach told me I should take dance lessons to help my skating, so I took tap and, because I was watching the TV show Fame, decided I wanted to be a dancer.

I moved to New York to study at Alvin Ailey’s dance school when I was 17, and my first job was in Michael Jackson’s Bad music video. It was an amazing experience. He was really cool and very approachable – I think he always had a connection with dancers. He told me he’d learnt tap from the Nicholas Brothers, which in the world of dance is the best of the best.

That video led to work with Vanessa Williams, then Prince and Janet Jackson. One of the directors I’d worked with was then directing The Bodyguard, and asked me to come to a meeting. My first day was a rehearsal with Whitney and Kevin Costner.

Whitney and I clicked right away. She was very funny when we were on set: she was definitely more about having a good time than working hard. She was a good dancer – she had seven years of ballet experience – but at the time, people said she couldn’t dance. She said, ‘I can dance, but people don’t come to see me dance, they come to see me sing.’

Whitney used to invite me over to her huge Winnebago to hang out on set. She was pretty wary of the press at the time, so we’d leave the set under a blanket and run back to her trailer. Then we’d watch lots of performance videos – Mariah Carey was just coming out at that time – and plan her dance moves and also pick out songs for her next album.

At that time, she was at the start of her relationship with Bobby Brown. She would talk about him a lot and she was really excited about him. I didn’t meet him on set, but I did go to their wedding a few years later. The sad thing about my friendship with Whitney was that the last time I saw her was when she was shooting the I’m Every Woman video, and I was choreographing it. She was pregnant with Bobbi Kristina: it’s heartbreaking to think that they ended up dying in similar ways. [Her daughter died aged 22, three years after her mother.] The whole thing is really tragic.

The Bodyguard was a huge success: the soundtrack is still one of the bestselling soundtracks. I remember being on tour with Prince when the movie came out, and it was playing a lot on the planes we were taking. Everyone in the crew was making fun of me for my little scene – most of my acting ended up on the cutting room floor. But I’m proud of it: it was an amazing experience to be part of, and something I look back on now and think, ‘Was that real?’

— Interview by Jessica Salter The Prince of Eg ypt, choreographed by Sean Cheesman, will be at London’s Dominion Theatre from 5 February 2020 (theprinceofegyptmusical.com)