Return of the leaping beauty

The Royal Ballet boasts only one indigenous, house-reared star and it is doing its damnedest to exploit every talented and alluring inch of her. In its present consumptive state, it would be mad not to. From her student days at the Royal Ballet School, it was clear to all she was special. She was carefully tended like a precious orchid. When she graduated she was taken not into the Royal Ballet, but into the smaller touring company, now Birmingham Royal Ballet, where she would have quicker access to solo roles. One year later she moved to the Royal Ballet and became Kenneth MacMillan's choreographic muse. She was 20 when he created The Prince of the Pagodas on her, his first full-length ballet in eight years.

So here is Darcey Bussell, who does fashion shoots and interviews to promote not only herself but the Royal Ballet. She even gamely agreed to the Follow Her poster campaign, which used her beckoning image for the company's season in Hammersmith last autumn. (It was unfortunate that fans then arrived to find they had followed a mirage, because injury kept her off stage.) She is, as more chauvinistic members of the public and press assert, Britain's answer to the likes of Sylvie Guillem, the Royal Ballet's French guest star. You want fashionable tallness? Well, we have Darcey. You want 180-degree arabesques? Well, we - and so on.

How unfortunate: as if to admire one, you have to diminish the other. Guillem is cast as the petulant diva, the purveyor of shallow Gallic chic, the desiccated collection of pretzel limbs. Bussell is the oh-so-British teamplayer, the jolly-hockey-sticks girl, glowing with health, strength and niceness. In a profession where ruthlessness is deemed necessary, she does seem genuinely good-natured. She has a freshness and simplicity that transfers from life to stage.

At 5ft 7in she is not that tall - only tall in relation to other British dancers. "When I go abroad to other companies, I'm only average," she says. What does she get out of dancing? "I suppose it's like people who get fanatical about fitness, it's a sort of drug. I get fanatical about being a perfectionist. Even though I've done Swan Lake since I was 20, every time I find something else to do in it." She talks also of the irresistible adrenaline high of performing, although it doesn't stop her getting stage nerves. "They wear off a lot quicker now, but I still get them 10 minutes before the performance starts.

"I will always be nervous before The Sleeping Beauty. Every time I hear the music from the Garland Dance [before Aurora arrives] I get that horrible churn inside me; it doesn't matter where I am, I could be in a supermarket." Aurora's first entrance is terrifying "because right after, you virtually do the whole ballet; you're thrown right in and you can't hide anything. As you perform, there are, like, these weights that fall off. So after each section you feel more relaxed. But it's so difficult, something is always going to go wrong".

She will perform The Sleeping Beauty in the Royal Ballet's first London Coliseum season (starting on Tuesday), along with Manon and La Bayadère, partnered by Igor Zelensky, the exciting Kirov dancer who has become Bussell's most compatible stage partner, big and powerful enough to match her all the way. She will play Nikiya in Bayadère, as she did in February in St Petersburg, when the Kirov Ballet made one of their rare invitations to outsiders. Some Russian observers found room for improvement in her interpretation. How did she feel?

"Terror, although pleased to be asked. The stage has a rake and is so much larger than ours; their Bayadère is different, and it was all these things to get used to at once. And the company has 200 dancers who have that amazing ancient tradition, and the talent is overwhelming. So how can you be confident? It was especially difficult as I hadn't had a stage rehearsal, so my first performance was completely new to me and I think people could feel I was nervous. They said, come back and do Swan Lake, and I think I would be a lot more comfortable if I did."

She has also accepted engagements in Japan, Australia, Greece and America this year, during the Royal Opera House closure. She admits that morale within the itinerant Royal Ballet has been low, that it has been hard to keep the dancers motivated. "I don't think we realised how lucky we were to have our own theatre and, if anything, our homelessness has woken us up," she says. "It made us realise how important it is not to lose the Opera House. And it has also made the company stick together a lot more, and understand how we need to sell ourselves. Before, we were so spoilt, we relied on the theatre to do it for us."

A few years back, New York City Ballet wanted to poach Bussell, but she declined because she didn't want to miss out on the widely varied repertoire stored in the Royal Ballet's cupboards. She believes the Royal Ballet has a golden future at the new Royal Opera House. "Even now, we feel better, because we can see an end to the building work, and a lot of us have been able to walk round the theatre and see the advantages. So it actually feels very exciting."

With their improved facilities, including more studios and a small internal auditorium, the company's work pattern will benefit. "We'll have time to rehearse longer days, because we won't be doing all that time-consuming travelling from the Barons Court studios to Covent Garden any more. We'll also have an enlarged coaching staff, so we will have more help with roles. And the studio theatre will give the opportunity for small-scale works. All this means people are realising they'll have a lot more chances, a lot more encouragement to push themselves."

Eleven years on from her first day as a professional dancer, Bussell has had so many chances she has become the name that even ballet-phobes recognise, famous enough to make it into Madame Tussaud's and the National Portrait Gallery. She is well pleased with both created images. What? But those wax figures always look so stiff. "No, this one is incredibly alike, it's actually scary. They usually take what they can from pictures, but I was actually on site all the time. Dancers are very fussy about how a position has to look - I'm balanced in a Sleeping Beauty attitude - so I wanted to be there to make sure it was going to be right."

She also hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, as one of Allen Jones's glossy, foxy icons. "When I saw these books with his paintings, I thought, wow, if he could make my body look like that, I'll be so happy. He wanted to paint me because he was fascinated by my pointe shoes and the line of the leg, the streamline effect of the calf going into the back of the ankle - which is why he likes women with stilettos. On pointe, it's even better, because you're even higher." The picture belongs to the gallery, but Jones did give her one of his preparatory watercolours.