Camilla's Last Dance The Day She Walked Away From Her Dream

The DWTS Judge Reveals She Was Heading for a Burnout

- Amy Prebble

Camilla Sacre-Dallerup’s eyes well up with tears when she thinks back to the time she walked away from dancing.

“Oh, shoot!” she says, dabbing her impossibly high cheekbones with a tissue.

“I feel emotional even talking about it. Dancing was my identity. That’s how I used to introduce myself: ‘Hi, I’m Camilla, I’m a dancer.’”

The 45-year-old took a break from it all after her sixth stint as a professional dancer on the BBC’s smash hit Strictly Come Dancing.

“I had loved dancing and wanted to do it for so long,” she recalls.

“Then I didn’t want to dance any more. It was scary because it was all

I knew and I didn’t know what to do next.”

The ballroom champion started dancing aged two-anda-half in her hometown of Aalborg, Denmark.

She joined one of her sister Jeanet’s classes and fell in love – with ballroom, tap and ballet.

“I didn’t really feel like I fitted in at school,” she shares. “But I just felt like I belonged in dance class. I did my first competition aged six. You’re supposed to be eight, but I begged my teacher for special dispensation.”

Ballroom became her way of exploring the world and, at 21, she travelled to London to dance with New Zealand champion Brendan Cole. They quickly became a couple and spent eight years relentlessly perfecting their technique, climbing the ranks from 96th to eighth in the world. Then, in 2003, at the Closed British Championships, they attended a meeting with TV producers about Strictly Come Dancing.