Janet Pharaoh: The Yorkshire dancer who was too tall for ballet so joined the Moulin Rouge

She started dancing at the age of five in her home town of Rothwell, near Leeds.

Her dream was to be a ballerina but she knew she was too tall so, with her mother’s encouragement, she became one of the Bluebell girls at the Paris Lido and then took up a 20-year residence at the Moulin Rouge.

“Although most people seem to start dancing at two or three, I was five,” she recalled. “I didn’t go to a full time dance or stage school. I did my normal schooling at Rothwell Grammar School and then I’d get the bus to the Mullen Dance Academy in Leeds after school and then back home to do my homework.

"We did the same exams as those at the boarding schools, but in many ways it is harder as you have to get transport.

“I was good but I was never going to be a ballet dancer as I was too tall. I would have loved to have gone into musical theatre, but those roles tended to go to the smaller girls.

"And so it was my mother, who was always my biggest supporter, who suggested I apply to the Bluebells.”

She passed the audition when still a teenager and joined the troupe on tour in Spain.

But it was a time of deep unrest there and when she was approached by the Moulin Rouge to join their company in Monte Carlo she accepted.

She stayed there for two and half years before moving to Paris in 1997 as dance captain and succeeding Doris Haug, the ballet mistress who had recruited her.

When the artistic director retired, she was offered the job.

She was a staunch defender of the traditional Parisien choreography, rejecting the idea that the skimpy costumes had become outdated and insisting it had modernised but kept its historical essence.

“It is pure escapism, We are offering them fun without any agenda and I make no apology for that,” she said.

Over the decades her artistic vision was played out at such venues as the Rio Carnival and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as an unforgettable performance at the Arc de Triomphe last December.