Legendary ballet dancer Wayne Sleep looks back on the extraordinary times he’s lived through. Wayne Sleep has danced with ballet legends Rudolf Nureyev and
Margot Fonteyn, partied with Freddie Mercury and performed on the Covent Garden stage in 1985 with Princess Diana, becoming her close friend.
Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, described him as “the greatest virtuoso dancer the Royal Ballet has ever produced”. Wayne was also the shortest principal dancer in the Royal Ballet and as such he had to spin twice as fast and jump twice as high to succeed.
However, behind the glitz and glamour, Wayne has always felt like an outsider revealing in Just Different the difficulties experienced by a working-class, gay man in handling the prejudices of his generation and living through the Aids epidemic.
In this moving - but also laugh-out-loud and gossip filled - memoir, Wayne Sleep shows how he danced his way to success, fulfilment and love, overcoming obstacles along the way. 
In conversation with Robert Dawson Scott.

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