Inside Diana's Secret Dance Lessons

IN A REVEALING NEW MEMOIR, PRINCESS DIANA'S DANCE TEACHER REVEALS HOW THEIR DISCREET SESSIONS SPARKED A CLOSE BOND AND GAVE THE ROYAL AN OUTLET FOR HER MOST INTIMATE STRUGGLES

- SIMON PERRY

Just weeks after Princess Diana's royal wedding to Prince Charles in 1981, Anne Allan, a dancer and ballet mistress with the London City Ballet, received an extraordinary request: The Princess of Wales wanted dance lessons. Soon she and Diana were meeting in a private studio in London for what would become hundreds of secret onehour sessions. Over the next nine years Allan and Diana developed a deep friendship. The princess, just 20 years old and newly wed, found in Allan a confidante with whom she could candidly discuss her personal struggles and the complexities of royal life-including her pregnancies, her battle with bulimia and the increasing unhappiness in her marriage to Charles.

Allan, who has rarely spoken publicly about her time with the princess, decided to write her new book Dancing With Diana: A Memoir (out Sept. 10) to reveal "the other side of her, the dancing side of her, the beauty within her," she says from her home in Toronto. "She loved to dance. The minute she started to move her arms, you could see the feeling that it brought her. She was able to be herself."