Shirley Ballas wiped away tears as she opened up on her personal life in a new interview. The Strictly Come Dancing head judge is the latest guest on Paul Brunson’s Need to Talk podcast.
The 65-year-old from Wallasey spoke about her love life after she ended her engagement to Danny Taylor last year. She has previously been married to fellow dancers Sammy Stopford and Corky Ballas. Shirley said her romance woes are due to her dedication to her career. She said: “I’m obsessed with what I am and with what I do. So it’s not just a job for me. I’m married to it.
“That’s probably why I don’t have a relationship.
“I don’t think I’m put on Planet Earth to have a relationship. Every relationship has ended up being a disaster. With my last boyfriend I thought I’d found The One and that also didn’t work.”
Shirley turned 65 earlier this month and is planning on leading a quiet life now. She said: “I’m going to start to be a bit more insular. At 65, I was going to have a big party but I decided I would have it with my driver George, my PA Harry, and my mum.
“We’d have just this quiet, no-noise lunch at Selfridges and a shop around M+S.”
An emotional moment in the interview saw Shirley talk about the death of her brother, David Rich, who took his own life in 2003 aged 44.
On the impact he had one her, Shirley became emotional as she said: “He was quite tough on me, he was more like the dad in the household, even though there’s only 18 months between us.
“But I really think, if he hadn’t have been the way he was, I wouldn’t be sitting here. So I don’t think he could control a lot of things that went on in his own life, but he certainly controlled a lot that went on in my life.
She added: “He was a great brother. He was. And somehow when he was 43, 44 he got poorly, lived in the north of England. I lived in the South and I remember my mum going to stay with him.
“She was with him for about six weeks. He seemed very low. He lost a lot of weight. We never really got to the root cause of – I think maybe, if I could just say his past was catching up with him, maybe – and, I just think he just somehow went into a dark hole.
“The thing is, with depression and mental health, I knew nothing about that. I was busy, I had my son, I had my husband, my mother lived with me and somebody else’s two children that I raised. So life was busy and I didn’t stop to go up there. My mother did. Again, she wasn’t a great communicator, so she didn’t say, ‘You need to stop everything. You need to come up here’, you know?”
Shirley emotionally continued: “He faded fast. And then there was just one time when my son was singing at Saint Paul’s Church, and I said to my mum and brother, why don’t you come up for the week? And he goes, ‘No, I’m feeling much better. Let mum go’..
“And she went and he took his own life that weekend in our home, in our north of England home. So it was just, it was tragic. It was sudden. It was… you can’t even explain it unless you lose somebody.”
Paul later opened up about his own experience of losing a friend to suicide, and how he took on blame. Asking Shirley if she carries any blame around her brother’s passing, she admitted: “I think my mother and I both.”
She continued: “I think the body takes on a role, and I think I can compartmentalize, but it’s stuck. I feel it’s still stuck. And every time I do work for CALM, and I have spoken to somebody, actually, in suicide who’s talk to me endlessly about not blaming myself… We’ve had counselling on it. But, it never goes away.
“And people are so, ‘Oh, we understand how you feel.’ Well you know what? You don’t know how I feel because you’ve never lost somebody in your family that was close to you. It’s only years later now that we continually talk about him all the time, you know, with this work that I’m doing. But even my mum bottled it inside.”