He forged a letter in his father's name, asking Ninette de Valois for an audition for her Sadler's Wells Ballet School in 1944. He did far more ballet lessons than he ever let on, either to his disapproving father or his schoolmates. He, too, had an inspirational teacher - in fact, two. Kenneth's mother had died when he was 12, and for him, like Billy Elliot, dancing was his escape from grief, poverty and the grinding reality of everyday life. His father had been a miner in Scotland and was unemployed in Great Yarmouth when his son declared he was going to become a ballet dancer. Without knowing it, Hall also hit on the boyhood story of Sir Kenneth MacMillan, the great Royal Ballet choreographer who died in 1992. My twin brother hid in the car so I shouldn't see how much he missed me.' My parents cried when I was accepted and they cried when they left me at the school. 'I told Lee how I'd never seen a ballet, let alone any of the exercises the other boys were doing in the changing room beforehand. 'I had to get up at 3am to travel in my father's car to London for the Royal Ballet auditions,' remembers Mosley. Both his grandfathers were miners, who offered to support him at ballet school if his parents couldn't cope. He is the youngest of seven children, with an elder brother who was a militant miner. 'I do' volunteered Philip Mosley from Barnsley, a first artist in the company. Scriptwriter Lee Hall rang the Royal Ballet three years ago and asked if any dancer came from a mining town. At that age, I used to let off steam jumping around doing tap - ballet was much too hard'.īilly Elliot hits home because it is based on a true story.
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You can be free of the real world, lose yourself in your dreams. Cooper agrees: 'As you get older, you tend to lose sight of what drove you to dance in the first place. I just loved burning off the fire inside me - it's an impulse you can't help'. It's all that emotion you bottle up - and he found the way to let it out and really went for it. She looked gorgeous.'įor Bussell, the best bit was 'when the boy goes crazy in front of his dad. 'She was trying to pretend she hadn't noticed him - but he must have noticed her. 'You should have seen the expression on Sarah's face,' says Darcey Bussell. They found themselves sitting next to Hugh Grant. She was invited to the premiere with her husband, the dancer Adam Cooper, who has a part in the film. 'Yeah, that's what I feel - it is like electricity, like magic', admits Royal Ballet principal Sarah Wildor.
Proper boys charge down the street with football boots slung around their neck: Billy Elliot must be a weirdo because his shoes have pink ribbons instead of laces.ĭancers at Wednesday's London premiere punched the air when Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell, finally expressed in words and movement what dancing meant to him. W ho would have thought that the next big thing to catch the popular imagination would be a boy doing ballet? Even now, centuries after men took up dancing, ballet is seen as much odder than blowing a brass instrument or stripping in a working men's club.