A tearful Shirley Ballas has paid tribute to the late Len Goodman.
The Strictly head judge appeared on Loose Women on Wednesday to remember the dance show legend, who died on Saturday night after a short battle with bone cancer at age 78.
The 62-year-old, who first met Goodman when she was nine years old, said the last time she saw him, she knew he was secretly battling the disease.
When Ballas visited her son Mark Ballas, 36, on US Dancing With The Stars, on which Goodman sat on the panel as head judge, last year, she recalled that he was “quite frail”.
“I think it’s very difficult for all my particular industry because I separate Strictly and Dancing With The Stars,” she said on the ITV show.
“But I’ve known Len from a very small child and I have a lot of good friends in the industry and we all loved Len.
“He was a really big part of our lives and he was an icon and humour. He could make the rain go away and he was such a beautiful human being.
“Of course later in my career I trained with him.
“He was probably responsible for, you know, saying to me, ‘Shirley, you can take your work seriously, but stop taking yourself so seriously,’ because I was such a person that wanted to learn all about the technique.
“And he taught me more about the human spirit. So I will take that with me forever. He was just so wonderful. He really was.”
She said her son called him Uncle Len, as he had known him since he was a baby.
“I went to see the launch show last year when Mark decided he was going to do Dancing with the Stars and I saw Len there and I got my last and final cuddle with him there.
“Even though he’d got quite frail, I thought – because I hadn’t seen him in a while – he was still, you know, full of humour. ‘Come on over here’, you know, and he liked a cuddle.
“I kind of felt like he didn’t look the best that I had seen. As a philosophy in the dancing industry, we knew that everybody kept close quarters; we don’t put it all out there.”
Of starring in the next series of Strictly, Ballas tearfully said: “I’m very excited.
“I don’t think I could ever fill Len’s shoes, but could with my fluffy slippers on... I will be thinking of him.”
On Monday, the star appeared on Good Morning Britain to slam rumours that she might not be returning to Strictly amid a pay dispute, just minutes before she learned Goodman had died.
The late TV personality was on the BBC dance show as head judge from 2004-2016.
