Princess Diana had a lifelong love of dance, and from 1981 to 1989, she found a rare sense of "freedom" by taking secret lessons from professional dancer Anne Allan. The dance teacher chronicled her time working with the then-Princess of Wales in her memoir, Dancing With Diana, and among the humorous and heartfelt stories in the book, she shared some thoughts on Princess Diana's famous dance with John Travolta—and how it compared to the royal's dance moves with Prince Charles.
Diana started weekly private lessons with Allan shortly after her 1981 wedding and continued with them up through 1989, when the dance teacher moved to Scotland. In her memoir, Allan wrote that in 1985, Princess Diana and Prince Charles headed on a tour of Australia, sending her a postcard that read: "Our jet leg is quite awful and still after week we are walking around in a haze! I miss my dancing a lot and my boys."
Following the Australian tour, the royal couple traveled to the United States, and Allan wrote that "Americans fell in love with Diana, and the now-iconic images of her and John Travolta dancing at the White House will never be forgotten." The professional dancer added that she "was delighted to see" how Princess Diana "had stretched her arms beautifully and lifted her head as she moved."
Allan described the tour as "a huge success," but one thing that she didn't find as successful was Diana's dance outing in Australia with Prince Charles.
"John knew how to partner and elegantly present his lady, which would have made it a lot easier for her to follow his moves," Allan explained in the book. "I'd seen her dance with Charles in Australia," she continued, referencing the famous outing when the princess repurposed an emerald necklace as a headband worn across her forehead.
Allan's assessment of the dance? "It was not as elegant."
The longtime ballet dancer wrote, "I had wished that they could have had a lesson together before that trip as Charles kept spinning her round, but she'd handled it remarkably well."
In Dancing With Diana, Allan also set the record straight on Diana's dance performance to "Uptown Girl," as dramatized in The Crown. Although it wasn't a 37th birthday present for her husband, the public dance fulfilled a long-held dream of Diana's, and according to Allan, her three-word review afterward was "Beats the wedding!"
As for Diana's encounter with Travolta, "she absolutely loved it," according to Allan. "On her return to London, the princess came bounding into the studio to immediately tell me, 'I danced with John Travolta,' and that it was the highlight of the whole tour."
To celebrate, the duo "had a fun class that day trying out some disco moves" with none other than "Stayin' Alive" from Travolta's hit movie, Saturday Night Fever.
