HOWZAT

This she had done from the age of 3, although by her teens she realised that she would never become a ballerina: “You don’t understand this when you’re young but ballerinas, they’re born. You have to have the perfect physique.”

So Phillips turned to teacing. A defining moment came when she was sent to London to scavenge for new ideas and attended a modern American jazz class taught by Molly Molloy. “I so fell in love with the way of moving, that I knew I wasn’t going to go home.” She moved to London, and Molloy became a mentor, introducing her to Ridley Scott, then a major player in advertising.

She would babysit and do housework for the Scotts, and her break came when he asked her to choreograph an ad for Lyon’s Maid ice-cream. It went well; a week later Phillips found herself doing a Dr Pepper commercial on the Bond stage at Pinewood. Her subsequent career has included Grease and Saturday Night Fever in the West End and a Tony nomination for Starlight Express on Broadway.

It was a fine time to be an attractive woman on the fringes of showbiz. “God yes, brilliantly exciting! I spent a lot of the time on the Kings Road, getting picked up by whatever flash car came by.”

But the years of abandon were curtailed in 1977 when she fell pregnant to a man whom she insists she will never name. Does he know he is the father of her 29-year-old daughter, Alana? “Um, probably not.” She was working in America on a film with the Village People, Don’t Stop the Music, and returned to find journalists on her doorstep. “I know how you can be torn apart for something you did or didn’t say,” she says pointedly.

For someone so used to giving criticism, she admits to mistakes, including pushing Alana too hard at school. “Those early days are very formative.” She has also spoken of “living on borrowed time” with her second daughter, Abi, whom she had at the age of 47. “Time is precious: I want to see her grow up and have children.”

Abi’s father is Angus Ion, whom Phillips met when he was a set builder for the video of Mercury’s I Was Born to Love You. They have been together for more than 20 years and Ion now runs her management company. Seventeen years her junior, he is happy, she says, to occupy third place behind her family and her career.

And what of Strictly? She describes it as “my glorious hobby”, before reaching for one of her gloopy judging metaphors: “It’s like wrapping something up with the biggest bow in the world.”

Not always, with her fellow judges Len Goodman and Bruno Tonioli jetting to Los Angeles every week to appear in the American version of the show. “Len can be grumpy when he’s tired,” she admits. Sexist, too: “Last year he was very ‘I’m head judge and you’ll stay in your place, Mrs Phillips’. I won’t stand for that.”

The conflicts are genuine, she insists: “When Len flew at Craig [Revel Horwood, the fourth judge] a couple of weeks ago, it came from nowhere.” Off camera, Revel Horwood is “really quiet”, while Phillips and Tonioli are “always gossiping”. She first met the Italian at one of her classes. “I was leading: ‘Feet apart, stomachs in, stretch to the right ...’ Bruno puts his hand up and says: ‘Explain? Stretch to the right?’ Nobody stopped my classes! We became very close; we’re going to take on the world, Bruno and I.”

Has all this attention turned her into a diva? “I have to be honest and say I think I’m one of the most undiva-ish people ever. I’m so down to earth: train here, train back, I drive myself to the BBC.”

If that’s not convincing, she will happily concede to being a tyrant. When she was doing a pop video for Diana Ross, her director introduced her as “she who must be obeyed.” She liked that. “The way I saw it, it made everything move much faster. They had to shut up and listen.”

Strictly Come Dancing is on BBC One on Saturdays at 6.05pm

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