Have You Noticed This: Why Are So Many Movie Stars Former Dancers?

Specifically, ballet dancers.

There’s this line from “Suits” that I’ve retained better than, well, anything from that show. It’s when Louis Litt asks another character what the three actresses Penelope Cruz, Zoe Saldana, and Audrey Hepburn have in common.

The answer is ballet. As Louis puts it: “They all owe their success to ballet because it gives them discipline and grace, it embodies our emotions, it's breathtaking in its beauty, and, most importantly, it expresses what cannot be put into words. You want to get ahead here, Harold? Take ballet, because right now, the only thing that's breathtaking about you can easily be put into words: nothing. Now relevé your ass back to work.”

Creative workplace abuse insult aside, I’ve always enjoyed that factoid. And over the years, I’ve stored away trivia of other actresses who similarly have a ballet or dance background. I learned that before pursuing acting, Michelle Yeoh was a ballet dancer who studied at the Royal Academy of Dance. Her costar in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Zhang Ziyi studied folk dance at the Beijing Dance Academy. Charlize Theron’s ambition was to be a ballet dancer before a knee injury put her on the path of acting instead. Diane Kruger, who also studied at the Royal Academy in London, dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer before a broken knee shuttered her ambition when she was 13.

So why is there a fair amount of crossover from ballet dancing to acting? And what is it about ballet that helps with the craft of acting?

This recent video of Anya Taylor-Joy, who also has a ballet background, gives some insight.

When talking about her role in “The Queen’s Gambit,” Taylor-Joy says, “Ballet has played a huge part in the way that I act because it’s finger choreography.” It has helped her with understanding choreography. The discipline she learned in ballet has also carried on into her acting.

Discipline also plays a part in why George Miller cast Taylor-Joy as Furiosa, a role played by Theron first in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” In a CinemaCon interview, he mentions that Taylor-Joy, like Theron, was a ballet dancer, and “very, very disciplined.” Citing his experience working with dancers on “Happy Feet,” Miller said he “understood the emotional discipline as well as the physical discipline they had, so all of that led to Anya being Furiosa.”

It’s also not hard to see why dancers might transition into acting considering they’re both avenues of creative expression. When talking about her early days as a dancer, Kruger told IndieWire, “I didn’t know it then, but now looking back, I was a very angry kid. I had a lot of (anger), because things at home were tough. Unconsciously, dancing and performing was a way of getting those emotions out. And then you’re being rewarded for that by being on stage.”

If we’re looking at what skills are transferrable from one field (ballet) to the other (acting) in a career change, you can argue that a dancing background is helpful for mastering movement and choreography. It’s probably no accident that Yeoh, Saldana, and Theron are some of the biggest action stars in Hollywood period. Their dancing training translates well in action scenes. All of them look like they can snap my back in half in a fight. And that’s important: Whether or not they can actually do so is beyond the point. They look like they can.

But other side of this career pivot is darker. For several of them, their transition into acting was precipitated by an injury that prevented them from becoming a professional dancer. It’s a career move motivated by necessity. Both Theron and Kruger had knee injuries that shattered their prospects as a dancer, and Michelle Yeoh suffered a spinal injury before becoming an actor. Ballet is a physically demanding art form and a sport in the broader sense of the word. There are no teams competing, but the toll it can take on people’s bodies can be as grueling as any sport. And just like sports, you can also be forced into early retirement or your career can be over even before it has taken off.

I’ve never thought about acting as a career of great longevity. Famously, women don’t exist in Hollywood once they get to the age of 40. But considering the fact that a dancer’s career tends to end when they’re around 35 and the average retirement age of professional athletes is before 30 (NFL players are the youngest at 27.6), I feel that acting is extraordinary in the sense that you can theoretically do it no matter your age in life. You can be a kid. You can be a senior. Heck, you can even be over 35.