With tears in her eyes, dressed in shimmering teal and holding on tightly to her partner’s hand, Alex Kingston basked in the applause from the Strictly Come Dancing studio audience.
Her rumba – elegant, sophisticated and technically brilliant – had prompted a standing ovation from head judge Shirley Ballas, earning her an elusive ‘ten’ and cementing her firmly at the top of last Saturday’s leaderboard.
Now one of the favourites to win, Alex is something of a Strictly anomaly: at 62 she is more than twice the age of some of her fellow contestants. Even Bill Bailey, the oldest winner so far, was ‘only’ 55 when he lifted the glitterball trophy in 2020.
Also, Alex has never had professional dance training. While viewers have been up in arms, yet again, claiming that trained dancers such as West End performer Amber Davies and Billy Elliot child star Lewis Cope have an unfair advantage over their fellow contestants, Alex is more used to performing Shakespearean monologues than paso dobles.
Yet her performances, including one in which she stayed in character throughout as Devil Wears Prada character Miranda Priestly, have really struck a chord with Strictly’s fans.
On Saturday’s show, Alex again impressed with her professional partner Johannes Radebe as they danced the foxtrot to Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again. Dressed as the country singer in a blonde wig and a floral, tassled gown, she received largely positive comments from the judges, with Anton du Beke calling her ‘divine’ and Motsi Mabuse telling her she looked like she was ‘floating on air’ despite a mis-step.
Ms Ballas said she had the best ‘lady frame’ on the series and thought she would reach the final, but told her she needed to work on a few technicalities. She received a score of 32, which was four fewer than last week, but still put her towards the top of the leaderboard.
Before Strictly, many viewers will have known Alex as the mysterious River Song in Doctor Who, while others will recognise her as one of the country’s finest stage actresses. But to most she will be remembered as the wild-haired Dr Elizabeth Corday on ER.
Alex Kingston has been paired with professional dancer Johannes Radebe on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing
And it’s the seven years she spent on the smash-hit American medical drama that propelled Alex from little-known actress to one of the biggest TV stars of the Nineties.
Few, however, will recall the shattering personal heartbreak and betrayal that led to her taking that role of a lifetime. In fact, it was just as she signed a contract to join the fourth series of ER in 1997 that she finalised her divorce from the man to whom she’d been devoted for more than a decade – future Harry Potter star Ralph Fiennes.
The pair had met as drama students at RADA in the early Eighties and married in 1993, but just three years later, Ralph left her for actress Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior.
While Alex later claimed the shock of the break-up left her feeling worthless and suicidal, had their marriage gone to plan and she started the family she so longed for with Ralph, she may have never relocated to the US and stepped out of his shadow.
‘Ralph was one of the biggest British actors of the time, but during their relationship she was very much his actress girlfriend rather than a star in her own right,’ a film industry insider told The Mail on Sunday.
‘ER was her big break, and the unravelling of her marriage was, quite likely, the push she needed to carve out the career she wanted for herself.’
And in another case of life’s lows leading her to make a bold career decision, Alex has said it’s the recent loss of both her parents – English father, Anthony, a butcher, and German mother, Margarethe – that contributed to her decision to sign up for Strictly.
Added to that, she faced up to another personal drama last year, spending 2024 dealing with a womb cancer diagnosis.
Aspiring actress Alex met Ralph Fiennes while studying at RADA and the pair married in 1993
But just three years later, Ralph left her for actress Francesca Annis (right), 18 years his senior
The Surrey-born star has told of how she’d originally passed off her symptoms as ‘just old age’ and simply accepted it, before she actually haemorrhaged on stage. Even then, the show went on, with help of the costume department.
After a hysterectomy and radiation therapy, she says she ‘suddenly felt like myself again’. Nevertheless, she’s still competing on Strictly less than a year after her treatment finished.
But at the start of her career, it was then-husband Ralph’s decisions that heavily influenced Alex. When he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example, she followed suit.
‘I just thought, ‘I have to be part of that company, because our relationship will not last if I’m not.’ So I worked hard and got in,’ she said in 2013.
For a decade the pair were jobbing actors but in 1992, Ralph made his film debut as Heathcliff in an adaptation of Wuthering Heights opposite Juliette Binoche as Cathy.
The film didn’t win rave reviews but it propelled Ralph into the limelight and secured his status as a heartthrob, and just one year later his star exploded when he played the chilling Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List – earning him the first of three Oscar nominations.
Later he was to garner a whole legion of younger fans playing the heinous Voldermort in the Harry Potter films. But as her husband was becoming the toast of Hollywood, Alex was still doing plays in between guest roles on low-brow dramas such as The Bill and Soldier Soldier.
‘When we were together, his star was so much brighter than mine,’ she said in 2003. ‘I was doing theatre; he was getting big parts in film. The stardom thing became a problem, but there was never any sense of competition.’ Then, two years into their marriage, Ralph took on the role of Hamlet in a production in which Francesca Annis was cast as his mother, Gertrude.
The Doctor Who star was awarded a ten for her rumba by head judge Shirley Ballas
Despite the significant age gap – and the fact that Francesca had a long-term partner of her own, with whom she had three children – they embarked on an affair and Ralph left Alex in 1996. If personally Alex was at an all-time low, professionally things started to look up. She landed the lead part in TV drama The Fortunes And Misfortunes Of Moll Flanders, opposite a young Daniel Craig.
Just a few months later, in early 1997, she filmed Mike Hodges’s casino-set thriller Croupier, playing a South African conwoman alongside Clive Owen. It was her appearance in Moll Flanders that had caught the attention of ER producers, as they were searching for someone for the role of a new English doctor on the show.
‘Alex was making her mark on the film and television industry, she was reminding us all that she was a force to be reckoned with and that she wasn’t defined by her personal life,’ said the insider.
And, much to her delight, things also began to look up for her romantically. It was through her new network of friends in Los Angeles that she met her second husband, the German writer and journalist Florian Haertel, after they were set up on a blind date.
The date was such a success, that they married the following year, in 1999, on a beach in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having met a couple at their hotel bar who had done the same.
Their daughter, Salome Violetta Haertel, was born in 2001 following multiple gruelling rounds of IVF and a 36-hour labour.
‘I went through about 13 rounds of IVF before I got pregnant with Salome; it was very tough. You are so desperate, you don’t really understand what the long-term side-effects can be,’ she told an interviewer.
The couple tried, and failed, to have more children, and even went through the adoption process, twice, but to no avail. Sadly, the marriage didn’t last: the pair split in 2009 and their divorce was finalised in 2013.
Alex married her third husband, TV producer Jonathan Stamp, at the All Saints Anglican Church in Rome in 2015, and returned to the UK for good in 2019.
Ironically, as she prepared for her Strictly debut last month, her ex, Ralph Fiennes, also 62, released a trailer on YouTube, to promote his latest play at the Theatre Royal Bath. His dance partner in the clip is Francesca Annis. Although the pair split in 2006, after Ralph was caught cheating on her multiple times, they have reunited for the production Small Hotel, which he describes as a ‘story of reconnecting with a past lover’.
A coincidence? Who knows… but if the past three decades are anything to go by, the slight – deliberate or not – will only spur Alex onto even greater heights.
‘When [Strictly] approached me, I thought of that cliche: life is too short,’ she says. ‘Go for whatever it is you secretly long to do, because if you’re not brave and you don’t do it, it won’t happen.
‘And, really, what’s the worst that could happen? In the case of Strictly, you might get voted off. So what? You’ve done it. You’ve proved yourself.’
With such determination, the glitterball trophy is surely now well and truly within her reach.
