CHERIE LUNGHI says: “I have done so many love scenes in the past that I have learned how to pull off a sexy smoulder on the dance floor.”She wasn’t joking. For the past couple of weeks, the 56-year-old actress, who built her professional reputation on playing strong, self-sufficient women, has been deftly demonstrating just how sexily she can carry off that smoulder.
So much, in fact, that she has become the talking point of this season’s Strictly Come Dancing TV show.
Before the series kicked off, judge Len Goodman abruptly wrote off the actress, declaring: “She won’t win! No. Too old.” But on Saturday night, Lunghi glided through a spectacular rumba in a tight white dress split to the thigh, her glossy brunette mane falling seductively over smoky eyes, leaving the judges and the audience entranced.
“Every single inch of you worked that dance. That was fabulous,” pronounced the normally scathing Craig Revel Horwood, while Arlene Phillips suggested she had bewitched her professional partner James Jordan who, at 30, is 26 years Lunghi’s junior.
“You’re like a hypnotist. I’ve never seen James dance so tenderly for as long as I’ve known him,” she told Lunghi, while Bruce Forsyth joked that she must have had a busy week.
Meanwhile, as the scores rolled in (she headed the leader board with 35, the highest ever score for a rumba in the show’s history), Forsyth’s co-presenter Tess Daly couldn’t help but comment not only on Cherie’s “absolutely phenomenal and elegant” dance but also on her physique.
“I’ve got to say,” she gushed, “you’ve got the most amazing, to-die-for figure.”
Cherie laughed off the compliment but as Tess and thousands of viewers have realised, Lunghi may be the oldest female contestant on the show but she remains strikingly attractive.
DailyExpress
