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Alex Kingston has been lighting up the Strictly dancefloor(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Ray Burmiston)

She’s been dazzling on the dance floor for the last two months so it’s no wonder Alex Kingston is hotly tipped to lift the glitter ball trophy next month. The actress is a firm favourite with fans and last weekend her dreamy waltz was described as “pure magic” by the judges.

But even if Alex doesn’t get her hands on the Strictly crown, she already feels like a winner. Not only has the show been a “liberating” experience following her shock cancer journey, she’s made a friend for life in her professional partner Johannes Radebe.

And another silver lining, she reveals, is the impact the show’s gruelling training schedule has had on her body. Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Blackpool extravaganza, Alex beams: “I mean, my husband basically has said that my 25-year-old body has come out of the closet!

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Alex Kingston alongside Johannes Radebe(Image: BBC)

“Thank you Strictly, I will take it! I do feel better for it, I do. I’m walking taller, and I’ve found whenever I’m in the kitchen reaching up to a cupboard to get something that I do it with a pointed toe!

“I’m pure ballet around the kitchen now! There’s somebody who lives locally to me, and he’s a sports massage therapist who’s been helping me out, and he said that he can see muscles in my body developing and becoming stronger!”

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The 62-year-old has had a glittering showbiz career which has seen her tread the boards with the Royal Shakespeare Company and take on iconic roles in shows like US medical drama ER and Doctor Who. But Alex admits Strictly has been the job of a lifetime.

“Strictly is an utter joy,” she says. “I think it’s amazingly liberating learning a dance and then actually going for it and accomplishing it. And that is a wonderful feeling, no matter how scary it is. I love just expressing myself physically.

“And so having the chance to be in the rehearsal room with JoJo and learning about how I can use my body to express something has just been an real delight.”

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It’s an experience that is worlds away from the heartache and fear she found herself consumed by last year when she was diagnosed with womb cancer. Alex bravely opened up about her experience last month when she revealed in devastating detail how she had haemorrhaged while on stage and that led to her shock diagnosis.

She kept her journey a secret until she was ready to share her experience, one she hopes might inspire others. “It has made me fearless,” she admits.

“Well, at the moment I’m terrified for Saturday! But it’s made me want to encourage people to just go for it. I do hope to help others by speaking out about what I have gone through. I hadn’t made it public, and I just thought, ‘I’m going to because I haven’t been voted off yet!’

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“I’m showing people that I’m taking this journey forward and I just want people to know that if they’ve gone through something, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a health issue, even the loss of a parent – because that happened to me at the same time – anything like that, it is a reminder to just live, and live to your fullest. Just take every moment you have and enjoy it because you’ve only got this one chance, as far as you know.”

Alex has needed to embrace that courage on the dance floor after what she describes as a rocky couple of weeks in the BBC ballroom. Her Paso Doble saw her slip to the bottom of the leaderboard and dented her confidence as she struggled to cope with the routine.

But she bounced back last weekend with her waltz, which was praised by the judges and saw her return to third place in the rankings. “It was really important to me this dance,” she explains.

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“I psychologically needed to put the week before aside and I needed to be able to get on that dance floor and enjoy a dance and come through it. Just get all the cobwebs of doubt out of my system.

“So it was massively important. We just said to each other before, ‘it’s just you and me on the floor, this is for us’. It was wonderful to just have that experience and to get over the doubts.”

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The duo have become big hits with fans of the show(Image: Guy Levy/BBC/PA)

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It couldn’t have come at a better time as Alex and Johannes join the rest of the Strictly gang in Blackpool tonight [Sat]. They will be performing their couples choice routine to a mash-up of songs by Shirley Bassey and Geri Halliwell.

Alex says: “The whole Blackpool experience for me has been kind of rather abstract until now. We had a chance to do a big group number rehearsal and my goodness I came away from that day so excited because there are 47 people on the dance floor and we’re all doing the same dance number. It’s just beyond exciting!”

It’s that time in the series when the competition starts to feel even more intense for the celebrities as all eyes turn to the final. But is she daring to believe she can go all the way?

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Alex explains: “It’s a little bit like when I was going through radiation therapy. I just took my life one day at a time because you couldn’t do anything else with your day. There was nothing else.

“It was just knowing you had to go every day to do the treatment, and that was that. That was the focus. And it’s a little bit like that here at Strictly. I’m just taking it one day at a time, one dance at a time.

“That is my focus. I’m not thinking about the past, and I’m not thinking about the future.”

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But one man is, her partner Johannes. The smiling South African dancer hasn’t made the final since he was paired with John Whaite in 2021.

And he reckons Alex could be the one who changes his fortunes. Johannes says: “It’s nice to dance with somebody who’s been a fan of the show, who knows what it takes, maybe not from the inside, from the outside, who’s watched what it takes.

“She hasn’t lagged a day since I’ve met her. For the first time, I feel like I’m afforded the opportunity to take somebody to the final again. The last time I was in the final was with John Whaite, but with Alex, I see so much potential, so much willingness, that I’m like, ‘I’m going to give her everything she deserves because she really wants to do well’.”

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His confidence in her abilities does add a touch of pressure, but Alex isn’t thinking about herself. She adds: “I want to give him everything he deserves, that’s the thing.

“He’s such an extraordinary individual and I want to work as hard as I can for Johannes because he’s giving me all of his time and I don’t want that to be a waste. But I think the other thing that’s super important is that alongside learning the dancing, we are also learning about ourselves as individuals.

“We’re learning about how tough we are, whether we can, as Johannes said, put our ego aside and just get on with learning. And all of those things are part and parcel of this journey.