‘If anything goes wrong, it happens to me!’ Strictly’s Amy Dowden on cancer, broken feet – and bouncing back
Amy Dowden’s motto is simple: “Don’t get bitter, get better.” There is so much she could be bitter about. As the dancer put it herself in the BBC documentary Strictly Amy: Cancer and Me, in the past year she has had to contend with a mastectomy, chemotherapy, sepsis, blood clots and a broken foot, to say nothing of menopause, breast reconstruction surgery and the Crohn’s disease she has lived with since the age of 19. But this was the vow Dowden made last August on the eve of her against-the-odds return to Strictly Come Dancing. She had missed the 2023 season completely thanks to the cancer that came to light when she discovered a lump in her breast the day before her honeymoon. 2023 was a hellscape. 2024 was supposed to be her year. Until it wasn’t.
In October, in week six of Strictly, dressed as a freckly scarecrow for the Halloween special, Dowden collapsed backstage after her foxtrot to Dancing in the Moonlight. Her breast cancer – actually two types of cancer, ductal and lobular – is in remission, subject to annual checks, and her Crohn’s is under control. But stress fractures to the shin are a common peril for all dancers. Having spent most of the previous year in and out of hospital, she then had to watch the show from the sidelines again, as her celebrity partner – the JLS singer JB Gill – made it all the way to the final with Dowden’s friend, the professional dancer Lauren Oakley.
All that has got to make her just a little bitter, no?
“I was devastated,” she says, “and I really struggled. Because Strictly was my aim since the words: ‘Amy, you’ve got cancer.’ That was the goal – to get back to the dancefloor – and that’s all that was in my mind for 20 months. I think I would have struggled with it in any year, but for it to happen then …
Related: ‘Strictly terrified me!’ Chris McCausland on self-belief, shame and becoming the star of the show
“I had been given such an amazing partner in JB. I knew I had the potential with him to go all the way to the final. For my journey to be cut short in the way it was … I’m not going to lie: I was heartbroken, absolutely gutted. But I’m so glad that JB was able to continue and Lauren did such an incredible job.” The two ended up as runners-up to winners Dianne Buswell and comedian Chris McCausland.
With the Halloween nightmare firmly in the rearview mirror, Dowden, 34, is now preparing for her own tour, Reborn, alongside fellow Strictly professional Carlos Gu, a Chinese national dance champion. The pairing might feel odd to some viewers but Carlos and Amy have become besties over the past year. When we speak – Amy’s old tyme bulldog Lenny yapping in the background – the video call is interrupted by deliveries. (“This is all happening at once!” she tells the builders in the background. “So sorry – I’m on a Zoom with the Guardian.”) “I’ve got my fabulous builders here,” she tells me. “They’re doing Carlos’s bedroom.” Now based in the UK, Carlos is getting his own room in her house in the Midlands.
The two know each other from Latin dance competitions at Blackpool earlier in their careers. “Carlos is the perfect height for me,” she explains. “Same height as my husband, who was my dance partner. It is important.” As the title suggests, the narrative of their show is one of rebirth. “We both feel ‘reborn’: me after my cancer journey and him after moving to the UK and finally being able to – he feels – be true to himself. Being gay, he’s accepted in the UK, and here he can wear the clothes he wants, be the Carlos Gu that he had been holding back. We’ve both got a strong story to tell.” (Strictly fans will have not have missed the “out and proud” Carlos narrative coming to the fore in the latest series.)
Starting in March, the Reborn tour will play more than 20 shows across the UK and includes all the classic elements of ballroom and Latin, as well as Argentine tango, lyrical dance and flamenco. Before that, Dowden will be appearing on the Strictly arena tour in January and February. Isn’t it a bit much? It’s barely eight weeks since her injury.
“I’m feeling so much stronger. I’m at the gym, I’m working with my physio team, I’m having dancing lessons. It was just very unlucky – could have happened to anyone. But typically, if anything is going to go wrong, it happens to me.” This is said as a joke – but, still, it does seem as if Dowden is dogged by misfortune. How does she not get down? “I learn from it every time. I try not to let it define me. And I try to bounce back.”
Since she joined Strictly in 2017 – a rather unfortunate short-lived pairing with the performer Brian Conley – Dowden has established herself as an angelic, girl-next-door presence who has made “bouncing back” her hallmark. She took the decision to share her “cancer journey” on social media and television, showing every detail from the reality of her naked post-mastectomy reconstructed breast to having her head shaved in her kitchen at home, and later appearing on Strictly bald. The thing she has found most challenging about all this, she says, is the internet trolls. They have called her “narcissistic”, “attention-seeking” and “pathetic”. Learning that her cancer diagnosis was stage two (on a scale that ends at four), one commenter complained: “She doesn’t even have Stage 4.”
“You can have hundreds of lovely comments and that one nasty comment is the one that stays with you,” she says. “I’m really lucky to have an incredible group of friends and family, and I have so much support that I just hang on to them.”
A remarkable mix of sweetness and grit, Dowden is the only professional dancer on Strictly who initially said no to the show. She was first approached when she was 25. At the time she and her dance partner (now husband) Ben Jones were runners-up at championship level in Latin dance. They had not yet won the British title. Strictly was her dream. But it was also her dream to win at Blackpool, where the national championships are held, and competition comes first.
She had been marked out as a possible future champion ever since she won a disco competition on a family holiday to Cornwall on her eighth birthday. When she got home to Caerphilly, she took dance lessons and, after a couple of weeks, the teacher took her parents aside to talk about her potential. “When I first walked into the Tower Ballroom at the age of eight,” Dowden recalls, “I said, ‘Mum, I want to win this.’” But when Strictly came calling, she had to choose. “I was the first pro to ever say no. Ben and I had trained and worked so hard, and our teachers had worked so hard, and our sponsors and our families … I couldn’t believe that Strictly were asking me – but they weren’t asking Ben. How could I take away Blackpool from him? And TV world was a new world. I didn’t know if I would like it. I had to stay true to myself.”
If they had asked for them as a pair, she would have said yes, she adds. “But we both had this dream to win Blackpool.” Didn’t she think about the fact that they might not win? “Absolutely. But I couldn’t take away his chances.”
The Blackpool title is crucial to dancers: not only are they fiercely competitive but a championship win affects their ability to launch themselves as teachers, coaches and judges. No one wants to go to the runner-up’s dance school, right? (She and Jones now run the Art in Motion Dance Academy in Cradley Heath, near Birmingham.) “Not quite,” Dowden says, diplomatically. “But there’s only one champion a year. And when you have that, no one can ever take it away from you.” The two of them became British Open Latin dance champions in 2017, the first all-British pair to win in more than 30 years.
A few weeks later, a second call came from Strictly. “They congratulated me for winning and then said, ‘Is this a good time now? Is this a good year?’ I couldn’t believe it that both my dreams came true. When I told them before, I was in tears: ‘If you ever get the opportunity to ask again, I promise I am loyal and trustworthy.’ I guess they had got to know me as a person.”
She describes her determination to dance as being “in her blood”. But her family has no connections to that world: “I’ve tried to teach them to dance and … just no,” she laughs. Her father, Andrew, is a carpenter; her mother, Gillian, works in accounting. They still live in the same house she grew up in. “Although they are not dancers or performers, they instilled a work ethic: never to give up and to follow our dreams. They devoted their lives to us as children, they showed us what hard work is, they did everything they possibly could for a working-class family.” Her twin sister, Rebecca, is a midwife. Her brother Lloyd is an electronic engineer. At Christmas, Dowden posted a picture of them all wearing Gavin and Stacey masks to watch the programme’s Christmas special, including honorary family member Gu, who must have felt surprised to find himself in a Smithy mask. (Dowden was Stacey, of course.)
There’s always a sense that these professional dancers – and their families – are used to sacrificing everything for the win. Dowden admits that she herself wanted to continue in last year’s series. “There is an incredible physio team [on Strictly] and they will never let us push ourselves and put anything at risk. Probably if it was up to me, I would have continued. But understandably, with Strictly looking after us … We want to dance for a long time and the producers want to protect us.” She took the advice to withdraw, even if giving up is something that a dancer does with extreme reluctance. “Probably, as a dancer, I would have tried to carry on. You build a resilience to aches and pains. It’s part of the job.”
Her frustration is also down to how hard she worked after chemo. “In spring last year there was a time when I doubted I would make it back on the dancefloor. It was the hardest rehab I ever had to do. I have a completely new upper body. I’m still not at the level where I was before, but I’m working at it. I’m so glad that I didn’t give up. Because I knew that I wouldn’t ever truly be happy if I didn’t get back there.”
But now she is back. Really back. “I want to push and do all I can. Because I had it all taken away from me. And I just want to soak it up and enjoy it after everything I’ve been through. Dance is my happy place. And hopefully Strictly will have me back next year. After having to pull out this year, I still haven’t had that year of being back dancing and feeling truly like Amy again.” Let’s hope 2025 will be her year – although something tells me there is no limit to the number of times this woman can be reborn.
• Amy & Carlos: Reborn is at Birmingham Symphony Hall on 10 March, then touring.
