‘I wish the curse of Strictly would strike me’
Ahead of the Strictly tour, Shirley Ballas plays matchmaker to over-50s – while also looking for love. Daphne Lockyer reports
SStrictly Come Dancing the very pinnacle of glamorous, fiftysomething womanhood, does not look like a candidate for the shelf. Smart and funny, talented and trim, impeccably coiffed and manicured, you’d expect a posse of eligible men to be cha-cha-cha-ing to her door. She laughs. “If only.”
Twice-married, Ballas has been single for the last four years. “Why? Too much pain, too much heartache,” she says. “I just think that I’ve never been able to get it quite right.”
Much has been made of the supposed “Curse of Strictly” involving already romantically attached professional dancers and their celebrity partners – to wit, comedian Seann Walsh and his partner Katya Jones, in the most recent series. But strictly single Ballas can only dream of such shenanigans. “God,” she hoots, “I wish it would strike me!”
Appropriately, we’re meeting Ballas – every inch the affable, sparky Scouser – at the London studios of ITV’s This Morning, where she has signed up to present Matchmaker Mountain, a month-long segment during the daytime show in which she will accompany a group of six men and women, all aged over 50 and looking for love, to a romantic location in Morocco. Think Love Island but for silver foxes and vixens.
“I find the whole idea of the over-50s falling in love emotional because it’s about people who’ve had a life, families and marriages that haven’t worked and dates that have been rubbish. But at over 50, they’re still hopeful… and they’re certainly not dead yet.”
Unlike the sexual tension of Love Island, Matchmaker Mountain draws a veil on anything bedroom-related. Not, says Ballas, that there’s anything wrong with having an active love life post-50.
“A child might hate to think of a parent having sex. It’s a taboo, at any age. But if you’re over 50 and you find someone marvellous, why shouldn’t it include sex?
“But,” she adds, “it’s not what drives me. I’ve never been a party girl. I’m the one on a night out who ends up holding the coats, not being drunk on the floor. I’m looking for someone kind and caring to share my life with. And I’m truly ready to find that person now.”
Ballas’s first husband, whom she married aged 18, was her dance partner, Strictly Sammy Stopford. “And I can’t regret it because I learned so much.” The marriage foundered when Ballas met Corky Ballas, a younger professional dancer. The duo wed in the mid-Eighties and also became Latin dance champions extraordinaire. However, the relationship was volatile and finally ended in 2007.
They had a son, Mark Ballas, now a dancer and actor himself, and, says his mother, the best thing that ever happened to her. “OK, we might not have had the best marriage, but we had a beautiful, amazing son together, so I can’t regret that relationship either.”
By now, Ballas is close to tears and apologises. ses. There is still a lot of hurt over an exposing interview with her ex that ran in a tabloid j just days before she joined Strictly in 2017. She had remained good friends with Corky right up until its publication. “He was at my home in Los Angeles fixing my Netflix just a couple of days before,” she says.
Why did he do it? “That’s the million-dollar question. Who knows? But it’s sad for both of us because there are things – like a tour, for example – I’d have still loved to do with him. What can I say? It’s sad because I adored him and I still adore him now. I also forgive him, because it isn’t me to bear a grudge.” Tellingly, what hurt most in the article, she says, was her ex’s comments about Audrey, the mother she adores. He described her as “a termite eating away at the fabric of the marriage”.
In fact, says Ballas, without her mother – who raised Mark while his parents danced – they would never have become British champions in 1995 and 1996. “I find it amazing that he doesn’t acknowledge how much she did for us, that he was willing to push her down in order to push himself up.”
Audrey raised Ballas and David, her brother, as a single mother, on a council estate in Wallasey – the area where her mother still lives and to which Ballas, who divides her time between East Dulwich and America’s West Coast, frequently returns. Indeed, she has been staying there during her pantomime debut, appearing as Mother Nature in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Liverpool Empire, which ends today.
Couldn’t she afford to take some time off? Perhaps, she says, “but I’m married to my work, and this was a new opportunity that I didn’t want to miss.”
Ballas learned the value of hard work from her mother. “She’s been a grafter all her life,” she says. “She worked in the local Cadbury factory, she cleaned, she did bar work. She taught me that everything in life must be worked for, and I used that from the age of seven when I started as a dancer.”
Although recently diagnosed with cancer, Audrey, now in her 80s, is bearing up well: “We went to a Macmillan fundraising ball together recently and she was the life and soul of the party – as she always is. But I have to be super-strong for her at the moment, and she’s my absolute focus – which is as it should be, because she’s a mother who has honestly never given me a moment of grief in my life. Life without her would be impossible to imagine.”
They have been through a lot together, not least the death of Ballas’s brother, who took his life 15 years ago, aged just 44. “The start of December, the anniversary of David’s death, was always a shut-off time for me. I’d find the sadness of it all overwhelming. But filming the Strictly special through that time has helped me bring the spark back. That show has done more for me emotionally than anyone could imagine.”
There remains one large emotional hole in her life. Over the years, Ballas has tried to re-establish contact with her father, who left when she was two years old. “When I got the Strictly job, I wanted him to be proud of me. Just six weeks ago, I contacted him again after my half-brother, his other son, died. I tried to reach out, but he wasn’t kind to me. I need to face that it’s just a very difficult relationship.”
She prefers to focus on the positives. Later this month, she and fellow judges Craig Revel Horwood, Darcey Bussell and Bruno Tonioli take to the road for the Strictly live tour.
“We all get along incredibly well, but we haven’t spent an extended period of time like this together before. We’ll be staying in the same hotels, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together for three whole weeks. We’re about to discover exactly who we are as human beings.
“Never mind Matchmaker Mountain,” she laughs. “They should really think about filming that.”
‘If you’re over 50 and you find someone, why shouldn’t it include sex?’