As a little girl, I wanted to be a ballet dancer – I never missed a lesson, practised religiously at home, pirouetting in the living room to a much-loved recording of "The Sugar Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker – but to my disappointment, I turned out to be not quite little enough. "Too tall," pronounced my ballet teacher. I was 10, and it felt as if my life was finished.

As for the American ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, her muscles were wrenched and torn by the demands of the legendary Russian choreographer George Balanchine when she worked with him during the 1980s, as he tried to mould her into the required position. Little wonder, then, that Kirkland ended up taking amphetamines and cocaine to keep her performing when she was racked with pain and weak from a diet of coffee and cigarettes