I was called the N-word in Romford, by someone stepping off a train as I was getting on.

There’s a tweet somewhere saying, “If you like Africa so much, why don’t you go back there.” It was because I dedicated one of my dances to my three mothers – Mother Africa, Mother Nature and my mother.

There are yards and yards and yards of abuse every day. I ignore the lot of it.

A review of Phèdre said – because I was quite large at the time – Toby Stephens’s Hippolytus needs to get on a StairMaster.

I worked in a Helms Bakery assembly line that separated egg whites from the yolks and from time to time a box of rotten eggs would come through. Need I say more?

At this time in my life, I quite like myself but, for a large portion of my life, I deplored being shy.

It has been in myself, for allowing individuals who I relied on to make important decisions in my life that left me alone to pick up the pieces.

Loving, sincere, honest.

Escaping an abusive teen marriage and being blessed with the opportunity to create a new life for myself and my two young children in London at the height of the swinging 60s.

Oprah Winfrey, as Maya Angelou and Tina Turner are no longer with us. These women are Afro-American queens who, despite growing up in the racist south experiencing physical, emotional and sexual abuse, rose to the top of their professions and are an inspiration to women everywhere.