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`Anyone for a biscuit?" It is that oh so English event, tea, that I am having with Sarah Wildor and Adam Cooper, two of the brightest (former) Royal Ballet stars, and they have decided that whenever a question leads into a minefield, the cry will go up: "Biscuits, anyone?"
Since there are minefields all around any discussion of their lives nowadays, we soon find ourselves needing a second plateful.
For Wildor, the biscuits are necessary in any debriefing about her sudden departure from the Royal Ballet last autumn as its new director, Ross Stretton, settled into his chair. For Cooper, it's the fate of his planned production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that may lead into explosive areas.
They sit there among the tea-cups, blonde, exceptionally good- looking, 18 months married. Cooper, 30, became a world star on his startling appearance as the Swan in Matthew Bourne's renowned rewrite of Swan Lake. The actress Emma Thompson said when she saw him on Broadway that she wanted to lick his feather breeches, and women worldwide knew exactly how she felt.
Wildor's luminous beauty alone would have singled her out of the Royal Ballet's cohorts of leading ladies - ash-blondes are few and far between - but more than that, she has a magnetic dramatic charisma, almost indecently alluring in someone who at first sight looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth. And then, last September, she "resigned".
Her statement was one of those bland "I feel that a change of direction would be of benefit to me as an artist" ones. It was written for her by management and she was obliged to accept it. "Isn't it a marvellously vague statement?" she muses. "I think it was right, in...