Michael Flatley’s feet used to move so fast, they tapped 35 times a second and required a £25m insurance policy on his legs. He hasn’t danced for nearly 10 years – not even in his own quiet way any more, he says – but the “feet of flames” that bewitched 60 million over more than four decades must now be in one hell of a state.
We are sitting at a table in the emptied breakfast room of the InterContinental hotel in Dublin when Flatley whips his right foot out on to the seat beside me: size eight, small and sockless in unflashy black sneakers. If my feet had put me on the Sunday Times Rich List, I say, I’d dress them in silk socks and stroke them each night to thank them. “Well, listen,” he says. “I don’t really give any of that any thought. To be honest, I don’t think much about me.”
Self-effacement is not what Michael Flatley is known for; at least, it’s not what the swagger of his stage persona suggests. Truth is, he says, “I don’t even look at myself. I don’t give that 10 seconds of my time … I get up to the mirror, brush my teeth, say ‘Oh dear’ – and gone.”
It was in 1994 that Flatley leapt into the public eye in Riverdance, a seven-minute extravaganza during the interval of the Eurovision song contest, in Dublin. He kicked and clicked his feet to throbbing drums, satin shirt billowing over his bronze chest, arms flung wide. Even his bouffant hair seemed to rewrite all the rules of Irish dancing. Each show he created afterwards – from Lord of the Dance and Feet of Flames to Celtic Tiger – delivered more taps for your bucks. And at 67, Flatley still seems to hear the drumbeat, always thinking, “What’s next?” he says, looking around the breakfast room. “What’s next?”
He says he’s let his “gloves down a bit”, but he looks dapper in a navy jacket, silken collar upstanding, and “a bit of warpaint” that his wife, Niamh, has put on him. (She was in the chorus line of that first Riverdance, and was subsequently his leading lady.) We meet the day after Flatley launches the 30th anniversary tour of Lord of the Dance. The news is full of the Irish presidential election campaign, in which he’d hoped to run as an independent candidate.
The unnamed “heavyweights” who approached him felt Ireland needed a new energy. “I was trying to envisage what the presidency would look like with me leading the charge,” he says. His fingers drum the tablecloth. “Meeting world leaders, bringing business and art back to Ireland.”
He decided against standing after a heart-to-heart with his 18-year-old son. Flatley was diagnosed with an “aggressive cancer” in 2023, and he’s still being treated, “monitoring really”, and couldn’t get the prerequisite clean bill of health. In any case, he says, “You need to get permission as the president just to leave the country. You need to get permission to meet world leaders … That’s restrictive for me.”
He probably has world leaders on speed dial. “I’ve got a few of them,” he says. “I’ve met Tony Blair and Obama, and the Clintons gave me awards. Putin, Berlusconi, Mandela.” He doesn’t flinch at putting those last names together. His respect for authority transcends politics. He performed at Donald Trump’s inaugural ball.
“Please don’t make a big deal of this,” he says. “I was born in America. I grew up a boxer, swinging sledgehammers on construction sites. If the president of your country asks you to perform, it takes a better man than me to say no, whoever that person is. ‘It’s my honour, sir. Yes, sir’,” he says.
“America gave my parents their dream – a job,” he says. He’s tapping the table again. It seems to be a reflex when he’s talking about energy, work, dreams, as if he’s keeping time with a beat only he can hear.
“It’s like I have a Ferrari Formula One car racing around in my mind and it won’t stop,” he says. “I can’t turn it off.” It comes from being “fanatically driven”. His mind is always on the go. Keeps him up at night. He’s only had five hours’ sleep. First thing in the morning, he sinks two double espressos, goes for a swim, then a power walk. Although he speaks slowly, he sounds deliberate, as if he’s overruling some insistent internal rhythm.
The problem is, “There’s always another dream waiting to happen,” he says. Last year he launched Flatley whiskey. He paints, using his feet and hands (his one exhibition sold out for a seven-figure sum). At the anniversary launch, somebody told him, “‘Well, you’ve done it all!’ I said, ‘Nonsense! I’m only just getting warmed up.’”
What more does he want to achieve?
“I don’t know,” he says. “Everything.”
But he can’t have everything.
“Why not?” he says.
Well, what does “everything” even mean?
“I don’t know. I don’t know what that means,” he says quickly. “Whatever it is, I’m in search of it … I want to do everything I can within my power while I’m still alive to leave a mark,” he says. “We’re so insignificant. We’re gone in the blink of an eye. How many of us will be remembered? Mandela, Ali,” he says.
Flatley? “Thank you for saying that,” he says – he’s scrupulously polite – “but it’s not necessarily true.”
Back when Flatley lived in London’s Little Venice, he walked past a graveyard every morning, after his double espressos, without much thought. “One day, I took a shortcut through it. And I said, ‘My God, you never took the time. Look at all these people. They’ve given their whole lives already.’”
“Having said that,” he says, “I’m going to give it hell to do the best that I can while I’m here … God bless me, I’m in the joy business. I’m in the joy business.” He throws his arms out wide. “I can look back on that deathbed and say, ‘You fuckin’ went for it.’ I’m sorry for my language, Paula,” he says. “Forgive me. I absolutely went for it. That’s just the truth.”
Although Flatley considers himself “100% Irish”, he grew up in Chicago. His parents emigrated to the US in 1947 to find work. His mother looked after the five children and helped his father build their construction business.
Flatley, who danced 300 shows in 1997 alone, credits his parents for his work ethic. The sledgehammer and cold winters crop up whenever he talks about his background. There was always more to do. On non-school days, his father would bang on the door. “‘Let’s get in the truck, Let’s move, let’s move, LET’S MOVE!’” Even after he made it, his mother wanted more: “Mikey, give up that old dancing lark now and go off and make a few movies.”
Young Flatley boxed. He only started dancing at 11, practising alone in the garage to catch up with his peers. Sometimes, he danced for 16 hours a day, just him and a broken mirror, hammering his feet on the concrete floor. He dreamed of becoming world champion. The extended family included a discus and hammer champion, a dancing champion and a champion boxer.
“Breeding beats feeding,” Flatley’s father used to say.
The trophies rolled in. “Seven all-American titles, five all-Canadian titles … but I couldn’t get a look-in in Ireland,” Flatley says. The form was strict. “It was very …” He stops. “I don’t want to use a word that might sound offensive.”
Prudish? I’m thinking of the open shirt and David Hasselhoff hair. “I can’t say those things!” he says, sounding utterly affronted. “Restricted. Restrained.”
To win the world championship at 17, he had to un-Flatley himself. He wore a kilt, kept his “arms tight, no flamboyant gesticulations …” But, he says sadly, “I felt like only half of me was present on stage.”
Over the next 18 years, he developed the full Flatley. Irish folk band the Chieftains invited him on tour with them. “And the more I incorporated my body and facial expression and energy and emotion, the more the audience reacted.” One night, he couldn’t find his costume. “Like a lot of bachelors, there’s shirts and other things under the bed. Where’s that tuxedo?” he says, looking under the tablecloth. He went on stage bare-chested. The audience loved that too.
All the while, he worked with his dad. He’d return from performing “on a one-way standby Allegheny airline ticket and straight into the truck … swinging that bloody fecking sledgehammer at 6am in the freezing cold Chicago winters.”
No matter, he says, because “I got my chance to be the star of the show … And that was enough to keep the fire burning.”
Flatley was 35 when he got the call to perform Riverdance – an age when many dancers consider retirement. He must have thought he’d finally made it, but eight months after the full show opened in 1995, he was sacked. He wanted creative control. “You wouldn’t say to a great painter, ‘Paint that painting, but you know what? Don’t use any red,’” he says. The music was composed by Bill Whelan, and the stage show produced by Moya Doherty and John McColgan, but Riverdance has always been synonymous with Flatley.
“They took away the show I created, and I was on my own, my back against the wall with the tears running,” he says. He’s “terribly sensitive”. He can pick out the one seated person in a standing ovation. (“What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I get through to the one?”) And after Riverdance, just like in the garage with the cracked mirror, “it was me with me again.”
Within less than a year, he’d opened Lord of the Dance. “It was a buzz. Like a drug.” There he was, between the audience and his dancers, like having the Roman legion behind him, he says, or the sound of Concorde. “Dadada dada dadada … You could feel the dancers’ energy. ‘I’m here, look at me.’ And every inch of energy they put out, they’d get back tenfold from the audience. You’re exchanging energy.”
Essentially, he made Irish dancing sexy.
“I don’t know if that’s true, but thank you for saying it,” he says.
Certainly his autobiography abounds with stories of burning the candle at both ends, partying in hotel rooms and …. “No, no,” he interrupts. “I have a wife and son now and it wouldn’t be fair on them. And it wouldn’t be fair on me.”
He and Niamh have been married for 19 years, in which time, he says, “I cannot remember us having bad words … Of all the things I’ve got out of my dance career, my wife takes first place.”
What he can say is that powerful men have a strong sex drive. “And that doesn’t mean a dirty thing. They’re driven, and I think the really great ones transmute that into their vision of success … or into my dance shows.”
The intensity and speed of his performance has taken a huge toll on Flatley’s body. He used to eat three steaks a day and had 7% body fat. Now he knows all his painful vertebrae by name. “My C1, my C3, my T3, my L5, my sacroiliacs …” He has torn muscles, damaged bones, ruptured tendons, shoulders that need replacing, and “a fractured rib that sometimes when I’m talking still pains me”.
In his prime, Lloyds of London, who insured his legs, told him, “Flatley, it’s like you’re fighting a 15-round fight every night.”
They installed iced water beside the stage. “After the encore, I’d put my head into the ice to bring down the temperature in my brain,” he says. In his dressing room, he had “The Beast”: a barrel of iced water. “I would get in and sit there as long as I could, to bring the swelling down in my muscles.”
Maybe this is why he loves swimming in the sea, or the Blackwater river in County Cork. “As soon as I put my head under, everything seems right again. It balances me. It’s very placatory.” The sound of the Ferrari in his head must be lost underwater.
Playing the flute is also “placating” (even in the InterContinental). And he loves reading.
Castlehyde, his Irish estate – which he and Niamh can’t live in because it’s currently the subject of a lengthy legal dispute over repairs – has a library. “When you close the jib door, it looks like another shelf … And I’d sit in the corner and say” – he leans forward, rubbing his hands – “‘Where’ll we go today, lads? Who do we want to meet?” It was “so silent”, he says. “When things were manic in my life, that was my wonderful escape from me. From me.”
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joyce…
“Forgive me now, if I get this wrong,” he says. “And er … And when he kissed me under the Moorish wall,” and he’s off, reciting a full paragraph from the end of Ulysses, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness classic. “And yes I said yes I will Yes.
“My God, he was a genius.” And he sits back, suddenly quiet. You can almost hear the quiet ticking and clicking of the engine at rest.
Maybe Flatley wasn’t so much lord of the dance, as dance was the lord of him.
“I needed to be on stage,” he says. “Before each show, I’d go into myself, and make a deal with myself. Flying across the front in my opening solo, anything can go wrong. You have to be lightning fast in your mind to deal with that. But I like being out there on the limb. Go past that, and you’re in chaos. And my deal with myself every night was: it won’t be a success until you reach chaos. Until you go too far.”
It is a lot to ask of anyone. “I never explained that to anybody,” he says. “But that’s what kept the razor sharp. It was me with me.”
