The current Winter Olympics is the most open about LGBT athletes in its history, which makes this a good time for a documentary about pioneering British figure skater John Curry, the Olympic and world champion of 1976 who went on to develop a brilliant career in performance, but never quite achieved the Nureyev-level reputation that he probably deserved.
The film interestingly shows that he was open about being gay but mostly escaped the nasty homophobia of the time. This was the age of the Gay News trial. It had something to do with his position in the Venn diagram overlap between sports and arts. Mid-market Fleet Street’s patriotism and reverence for successful British athletes meant he was not attacked – this was, after all, a star who appeared on Blue Peter and won the Sports Personality of the Year award. Yet his status as a dancer perhaps earned him the traditional reticence due to an artist’s private life.
At any rate, Curry was a passionate, demanding, sometimes waspish dancer and choreographer who lost most of his money on a national tour with his own company, and died of an HIV-Aids related disease in 1991, having certainly done his bit to establish the seriousness of ice dancing and figure skating, but not really taken it out of the sports arena in the way he might have liked.
This documentary could have said more about his relationship with his father, and it oddly does not mention his reported affair with the British acting star Alan Bates. It is respectful and interesting.
