In the 80s and 90s, Wayne Sleep was prime-time famous, on Wogan and Parkinson, Give Us a Clue, getting Gotcha’d by Noel Edmonds and Mr Blobby. But of course, he was also a seriously talented classical ballet dancer, “the greatest virtuoso dancer the Royal Ballet has ever produced”, the company’s founder Ninette de Valois once said. He made up for his short stature with explosive technique, giant leaps and natural charisma, energy always fizzing. Nobody since has so successfully crossed the line between classical dance and mainstream entertainment.
Sleep is about to mark his 75th birthday with a celebratory event at his old workplace, the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. He’ll be in conversation with Alan Titchmarsh, and performing too (you’ll have to wait and see what). I meet him at his house in west London by the Thames. At 5ft 2in (“and shrinking”) he’s voluble, cheeky, full of laughter, skittering across topics and off on tangents. Close-cropped white hair has long replaced the shaggy 70s curls. Though not as spry as he once was, he’ll still get up and dance to demonstrate whatever he’s talking about. The house, which he shares with husband Jose Bergera, is filled with photos of Sleep in his favourite roles – from choreographers Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier, Jerome Robbins; as Mr Mistoffelees in the original Cats and there are snapshots of Sleep with friends: one shows him smiling with his arms round Elton John and Freddie Mercury at Live Aid.
We’re not far from where Sleep first landed in London, aged 13, when he won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in Richmond Park. Born in Plymouth to a single mother, he grew up in working-class Hartlepool. A fan of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, he started tap classes but an adjudicator told his mum he was naturally suited to ballet (shades of Billy Elliot). “I went from West Hartlepool Tech where I was hooker in the scrum to Queen Victoria’s Hunting Lodge,” Sleep says, but he never felt like an impostor in this rarefied world. “It fitted me like a glove,” he says. “Once you get the bug, ballet’s addictive.”
At his Royal Ballet School audition, Sleep was supposed to have a height test to see how much he was likely to grow, but as he had to dash for the train back to Hartlepool, he missed it. Had they predicted his height, Sleep would never have won a place at the school. Surely ballet’s missing out on talent when it has such narrow ideals? “You have to accept it,” he says. “There are certain ballets I wouldn’t fit in.” (Younger generations are perhaps more willing to fight that idea now.)
Sleep was never cast as a romantic lead, and was underused in the company, but this gave him time to moonlight in theatre, film and television and make his own shows – and his growing profile then meant he was such good box office that the Royal couldn’t fire him. He had featured roles at Covent Garden, often comic or bravura: Swan Lake’s Neapolitan dance, the Blue Boy in Les Patineurs, a spritely, scene-stealing Puck in The Dream.
The thing is, he was good. “Remind me never to dance on stage with you again,” Mikhail Baryshnikov told him, after a lengthy curtain call. Sleep took it as a compliment. “I was in love with the Russians and that’s the way I wanted to dance. It was dangerous,” says Sleep. In class, Baryshnikov challenged him to learn a complicated jump. “He was the only one in the world that could do it. And I think I was the second one.”
Ballet studios were different then. “There were industrial-sized Heinz baked beans cans along the barre to be used as ashtrays, full of fags,” Sleep remembers. But it was a golden era for the Royal Ballet; the dancers had strong personalities. Today’s dancers are more introverted, he thinks, and he’d like to see more musicality. “You should play with the bars of music,” he says, acting out one of Margot Fonteyn’s entrances in Sleeping Beauty. “It’s called accent. You’ve got to lift it from the page.”
Fonteyn’s public image was sweet and demure, a good girl, but Sleep says she was no pushover. “A force,” he says. “You wouldn’t mess with her.” Although by the time she was partnering Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian was quite a force enough for the both of them. “That’s why she let Rudi get away with it all,” says Sleep, “because he did it for her.”
Nureyev was known for his bad behaviour. “Beryl Grey told me in Australia he was flicking prawns across the table at [FT critic] Clement Crisp, because he’d given him a bad review!” Sleep cracks up laughing. Nureyev was “hot and cold”, one moment swearing blue murder, “see you next Tuesday, all of that”, then “the most handsome, beautiful, soft human being in the world”. He pinched your bum, didn’t he?, I ask, remembering a passage from Sleep’s autobiography, Precious Little Sleep. “Well, more than that,” he says, under his breath. Sleep adds that the Russian was so blatant about his sexual interests, prowling the barre to eye up the new male recruits, “I felt embarrassed by him. One night I went, ‘Dinner first!’”
At the same time he was surrounded by ballet’s greats, Sleep was hanging with a different arty set. He’d met David Hockney when he came to draw Sleep’s ballet class. They bonded over youthful interest in communism. “I remember one night we got so stoned, me and David, and we played the Russian national anthem eight times.” He’s just been to visit Hockney in France. “We sang it together again on Saturday!”
There are great stories in Sleep’s first book – he’s now working on a second memoir – of holidays in the Dordogne with Hockney and designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, and Howard Hodgkin, with Terence Conran cooking dinner. Through work and play he seems to have met everyone: Sean Connery, Bette Davis, David Niven, Liza Minnelli, Stephen Sondheim, Christopher Isherwood, Shirley MacLaine, Vivienne Westwood. “On a Sunday everyone went to the same restaurant on the Fulham Road. On Saturday you would parade up and down Kings Road, people in open cars hooting.”
Sleep filled theatres nationwide with his company Dash, and couldn’t have been more catholic in his tastes, doing comic skits sending up Russian gymnast Olga Korbut, John McEnroe or a baby Prince William, alongside the earnest modern dance of Martha Graham. He directed and performed at many galas, most famously dancing to Uptown Girl with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1985, in a scene reconstructed in The Crown. Did they get it right? “I think they did very well, considering,” he says. Although the audience reaction when she came out wasn’t cheering but 2,000 people gasping in shock.
Diana would visit him. “She was very shy. She’d talk about the boys. She wasn’t a party animal, but she loved to dress up.” Was she happy? “No. I think it had just reached that point. She realised it wasn’t going to last, no matter what she did. Everything she did seemed to be wrong.” He adds. “Really it’s none of our business, is it?”
His association with Diana made him a tabloid target. “Diana said, it must be awful knowing me, Wayne.” One afternoon there was a knock at his door and journalists outside shouting, “Come out, we know you’re dying!” They were going to run a story saying Sleep had Aids. He’d been seeing a physio on Harley Street, and wonders if there was an Aids clinic nearby, or if it was just because he was friends with Mercury and Kenny Everett, who both died of the disease (as did Nureyev). It wasn’t true and a lawyer quashed the story. But when he did have an HIV test, the doctor told him to put a fake name on the form or it would be leaked to the press.
Sleep used to hang out with Mercury and John at the Embassy Club on Old Bond Street, London’s answer to Studio 54. On quieter evenings at Freddie’s house, “all he’d want to do was put on operas and see who could get the high notes”. Mercury was interested in getting involved in an artistic project with the Royal Opera House; Sleep was the bridge between those worlds. They were about to start discussions when Mercury became too ill to do it.
Sleep made his own choreography, for his live shows or TV’s Hot Shoe Show. “Half the time the choreography was like instant coffee. Had to be done on the spot.” But the good stuff needs time and that didn’t suit his whirlwind nature. “I just loved performing, and that’s what I was meant to do. Give a service.”
In 1998 he formed the Wayne Sleep Foundation, supporting dance students in financial need. It’s funded in part by his many appearances on celebrity TV shows. (“Celebrity Big Brother, six figures – would you turn it down?”) He’s also been doing lectures on cruise ships about his career, always packed out, which is where the idea for his birthday event came from. “You get on the ship, do three 45-minute lectures, get paid and then stop and spend all the money in Honolulu,” he laughs, warning. “Don’t do any more than 45 minutes, they’ll miss the bingo!”
It seems a good life. What has dance given you, I ask, and Sleep thinks for a rare quiet moment before deciding: “Freedom.”
