Meet Melissa Hamilton, British ballet's brightest hope

By Mary Greene


Last updated at 12:02 AM on 4th December 2011

Being declared a failure by a top ballet school would make many young hopefuls give up their prima dreams. But not Melissa Hamilton. Here she tells Mary Greene why determination, hard work – and a sprinkling of magic by her Russian fairy godmother – have turned her into a star

Melissa prepares for her debut as the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Royal Ballet's Christmas production of The Nutcracker

You could choreograph a ballet from Melissa Hamilton’s life story so far and she could play herself – in the role of a young dancer, declared a failure by her ballet school, swept abroad by a charismatic Russian fairy godmother only to return a year later to fill the empty pointe shoes of British ballet’s fairy princess.

It’s the stuff of ballet legends and fairy tales. Only this time it’s true, and the little dancer in whom nobody believed is now poised to enter the enchanted Kingdom of Sweets when she makes her debut as the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Royal Ballet’s Christmas production of The Nutcracker.

Ever since Darcey Bussell retired to teary eyed standing ovations four years ago, aged 38, her role as everyone’s favourite ballerina has lain vacant. But recently, the ballet world has been buzzing. A new star is on the horizon.

Melissa Hamilton, from Northern Ireland, ‘with her chiselled facial features, fierce intelligence, exquisite ballet lines and an unusual history, has all the potential to become the next darling and symbol of the British ballet,’ cries one ballet magazine. Or, as another critic put it more succinctly: ‘Think Charlize Theron in pointe shoes.’

Melissa arrives, slightly breathless, straight from a rehearsal, and drops gracefully into a sofa where she sits massaging her ankles. Here’s a girl who didn’t even start training seriously until she was 16 and, if she’d listened to her ballet teachers, would have taken early retirement at 17.

Now, at 23, and in her second season as a soloist, Melissa is being fast-tracked on a trajectory that we haven’t seen the likes of since Darcey Bussell’s debut 20 years ago. It’s hardly surprising that
there’s this buzz of excitement when for a generation – apart from Darcey – the stars of British ballet have been any nationality but British. For the moment, the Royal Ballet can boast only one home-grown principal ballerina – Lauren Cuthbertson, 27, who has only recently returned to dancing after over a year off with postviral fatigue syndrome.

Melissa in the Royal Ballet's Mayerling with Rupert Pennefather

In Agon with Carlos Acosta

Melissa, however, isn’t keen on comparisons, not even with luminaries such as Darcey. ‘It’s a huge honour,’ she says. ‘Even to be considered to be the next British ballerina is incredible. But I would much prefer to be known as Melissa Hamilton in my own right.’ Accolades haven’t turned her head, any more than she allowed those early setbacks to knock her off course. She’s friendly, helpful – and heavens, I only wish everybody I interviewed was as articulate and easy to talk to. But I have never, ever encountered anybody so young and so fiercely focused on where they are going. This isn’t just lissom grace and elegant limbs; this is steely minded determination to be the best. ‘If you really want something, you don’t let anything stand in your way, even if those obstacles seem monumental,’ she explains.

But growing up in Northern Ireland, where there is no tradition of classical ballet, meant that Melissa was a late starter. There was no magical first trip to the ballet to inspire her because the only performances she ever saw were third-rate Russian touring companies touching down in Belfast. She liked the tutus, she recalls, but they didn’t instil any passion.

If you visit the Royal Ballet School’s museum, at White Lodge in London’s Richmond Park, you can read Darcey Bussell’s school reports from the age of 13; her teachers used to complain that she worked too hard. At that age, Melissa took after-school ballet lessons once a week in a church hall. ‘It was a hobby,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t even see the Royal Ballet perform until I joined the company. But, to be honest, my love for ballet developed late. I wasn’t even thinking, “I want to be a ballerina.”’ That all changed, however, at the age of 13, when a summer school in Scotland opened her eyes.

‘If you’re not willing to sacrifice everything to ballet, then you’re in the wrong profession. It can be lonely, but when you step on stage, it pays you back’

Melissa’s parents – Keith, a builders’ merchant, and Linda, a teacher – were in no hurry to see their bright, academic daughter limit her options by going to ballet school. (She laughs when you ask
if her enviable physique is inherited. ‘Not if you saw my father!’ she says. ‘But my mother has long legs.’) They insisted that she took her GCSEs and, no surprise, she got seven A*s and two As. If she hadn’t become a dancer, Melissa says, she’d probably have ended up as a lawyer or an accountant; her elder sister Victoria is a trainee architect and her younger brother David is studying to be a teacher in Belfast.

Melissa was turned down by the Royal Ballet School, but offered a scholarship to the highly rated Elmhurst School of Dance in Birmingham. And at that point, it all started going wrong. She was miserable. She struggled to keep up. At the end of her first year, her teachers advised her to give up. ‘I was devastated,’ Melissa admits, still sounding hurt and angry. ‘When nobody believes in you, it completely demoralises you and destroys your dreams. Coming up against girls who had been training from the age of 11, I was playing catch-up. You think, “Is there any hope?”’

It was the moment in the fairy tale when Cinders is weeping in the corner. Cue: flashes of lightning and the entrance of her fairy godmother. This was when former Bolshoi ballet stars Irek Mukhamedov and his wife Masha joined Elmhurst as teachers. ‘Apparently, after my first class with Masha, she went into the staffroom and said, “There’s a ballerina in the class!”’ Melissa explains. ‘And everybody asked, “Who?” When she said, “Melissa!” they said, “But she’s no good – we’ve tried, she’s not had enough training.” But she said, “Give me a year…”’ At the end of that year, when the Mukhamedovs left to work in Athens, Melissa – still only 17 – begged to do the unthinkable and come too.

There followed a year of intensive training as Masha moulded a struggling young dancer into a ballerina. Melissa’s physique changed under the rigorous Russian tuition. But she learned more than technique. ‘She taught me the lifestyle. If you’re not willing to sacrifice everything to it, then you’re in the wrong profession. It can be very unforgiving and lonely.’ And it was lonely for the 17-year-old, far from home, in a country where she knew no one except her teacher. She would dance for four hours a day, six days a week, in Masha’s tiny studio, then return alone to her apartment to study ballet videos.

'You give up your life for the appplause,' says Melissa

Masha, she says, was her ballet mother. ‘If your mother tells you to do something you fight against it, but if Masha tells me, it gets done, no question. We’re both quite to the point. There’s no fantasy, no frills, no “Darling, that was beautiful,” when clearly it wasn’t. The reality is: it’s hard work.’

Then, fate struck. Melissa entered the Youth America Grand Prix [the world’s largest ballet scholarship competition], purely to gain experience. To her complete surprise, despite making what one critic called ‘a complete and utter cods’ of her entry, she won and was offered a contract with the American Ballet Theatre’s studio company. She was torn between her dream of auditioning for the Royal Ballet and an American offer that was too good to turn down.

Back in Athens, still jet-lagged, she and Masha set to work making a DVD to send to Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s artistic director. ‘It was a whirlwind,’ Melissa recalls. ‘This all happened within a week.’ She was duly invited to London to take part in a company class. Monica Mason offered her a place in the corps de ballet on the spot.

Since then, Melissa has been noticed as a powerfully sexy dancer, with fluid, remarkable legs. In her second season with the Royal Ballet (this is her fifth), the company’s resident choreographer, Wayne McGregor, created a role for her in the acclaimed work Infra that catapulted her into the limelight. ‘He had so much fun with me,’ she says. ‘He asked me to do things I didn’t think were possible.’ In 2009, she danced Balanchine’s electrifying Agon with Carlos Acosta, indisputably the most dazzling male dancer in the world. ‘That was incredible,’ she remembers. ‘To dance with such an icon… It makes you step up to the plate and be a ballerina. Because otherwise you look like a little girl dancing with this great star.’

You wonder if those teachers who knocked her back, and failed to recognise her potential, have ever said, ‘Sorry Melissa, we were wrong.’

‘I don’t think that will ever happen, and I don’t expect it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want it. It doesn’t matter to me. That’s very much in the past. I have no respect for their opinions or what they say because they did potentially ruin what I’m doing now. I’m sure if they see me on stage that speaks for itself.’

Tough words. ‘But there are different sides to me that people don’t see because I’m quite a closed book. I have a vulnerable side that I don’t reveal very often. It’s a defence mechanism.’ And when she lets those defences slip, she does sound vulnerable, and you realise what a claustrophobic, demanding world she inhabits. ‘It can be a very lonely career. But I’m used to living by myself. All I want to do is progress as a dancer. I’m ambitious. I don’t make any excuses for that.’ She lives alone, in a small flat in London’s Covent Garden, near the theatre. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. ‘I don’t compromise easily and people find that quite difficult to put up with.’

She doesn’t think that she will be one of those dancers who takes time out for a family. ‘Honestly? I can’t see it. It doesn’t fit in with my career plans,’ she says decisively. ‘When you step on stage and hear the applause, it pays you back. You give up your life for the momentary highs. But it’s important to have felt love – I have been in love. It didn’t work out.’ Yes, she admits, she was heartbroken. The experience has been stored away – to be drawn on, perhaps, when she dances her first Juliet early next year. ‘So for that, yeah, I’m happy that I went through it!’ she laughs.

This Sugar Plum Fairy won’t be having a family Christmas. ‘I won’t be in the mood for Christmas,’ Melissa says realistically. ‘I think the Sugar Plum Fairy might take away the Christmas cheer, because that’s all I’ll be thinking of. It’s not nerves, it’s just focus.’ She’s planning Christmas dinner with friends who are dancers. ‘It would be impossible to do what we do if we didn’t eat!’ she protests. ‘We’re not like models who can survive on coffee, Red Bull and cigarettes.’

She still keeps in touch with Masha, her fairy godmother, who is now ballet mistress for the Slovene National Ballet Company in Ljubljana. She will always be beyond grateful to the teacher who believed in her when nobody else did.

‘Everybody needs one person who believes in them and is willing to nurture them. Then you can break barriers and climb mountains,’ she says. ‘Masha was so much more than a teacher. She’s been a huge part of my life. I owe my career to her. You can’t always do things all on your own.’

But this, she says, is just the beginning. ‘The dancer I am now isn’t the dancer I’m going to be. There’s no way I’ve reached my potential. It’s very exciting, because you don’t know where the limit is going to be.’

The Royal Ballet’s The Nutcracker is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 until 18 January 2012; roh.org.uk


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