Travolta’s royal dance

John Travolta always squirms when he’s in a bar and a song from Saturday Night Fever comes on, said Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “Of course it makes me smile,” says Travolta, 60. “But I also have this fear that people are going to expect me to dance. Now, I don’t mind dancing, but the days of wanting to be circled by people while dancing? They’re gone.” Despite his reluctance to put on the old dancing shoes, Travolta made an exception in 1985, when he got up to waltz with Princess Diana at a White House gala dinner. He wasn’t nervous, he says, “because I’d seen her dance with [then-husband Prince] Charles, so I knew she was strong. But she looked like she was leading [Charles], and because the world was watching I thought I needed to give her certainty that I knew what to do. I put my hand in the middle of her back, brought her hand down so that it wouldn’t be so high and gave her the confidence that we would do just fine,” he says. “I felt I had taken her back to her childhood, when she had probably watched Grease—and for that moment I was her Prince Charming.”

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