Apart from her tired, red-rimmed eyes, Leanne Benjamin is exactly how you’d imagine an off-duty ballerina. Dressed in tight blue jeans, a brown, long-sleeved polo neck and regular black boots, she’s teeny tiny at 5’2 and definitely a size or two below the much-debated size zero. We meet at the Royal Opera House, home to The Royal Ballet, where she has been a ‘Principal’ dancer (top of the top in the world of ballet) for the past 14 years.

Minute as she may be, Benjamin has a big personality. As well as admitting to being a ‘little feisty’, she loves to talk, is articulate and mostly intense except when she whoops with laughter and has to take several huge gulps of air to recover her miniscule composure.

“I’m tiny,” she concedes, when I ask if all ballerinas are her size, “but I’m usually tiny and an unusually big eater. So I’m not the norm. I have a high metabolism that’s ultra high if I’m working. I’ve got to work to keep weight on.”

Benjamin is not the norm in other ways. In a profession where dancers mostly retire in their 30s, she is still going strong at 43 - the oldest of the 19 Principals (eight men and 11 women) currently with the Royal Ballet. She puts this down to her ‘good physicality’. She adds: “To be a Principal, you’ve got to have something special so if you can keep your technique up, your stage ability and maturity, then you can keep going.”

Today, Benjamin’s taking a rare half day. She’s already done a Pilates class and rehearsals but is exhausted after performing at a charity gala dinner late last night. What exactly is normal for a ballerina?

“It’s a proper nine-to-five job, you’re here constantly. You might come in at 9am to do some extra training, then class begins at 10.30am and finishes at 11.45. Rehearsals then start anytime between 12 and 6.30pm,” she explains. Her performance days are those she calls her ‘most restful’, warming up in the morning, then going home and returning at 4.30pm to prepare.

If most little girls grow up wanting to be ballerinas, then Benjamin broke the mould again. She says she didn’t ‘see Margot Fonteyn and realise I wanted to be a ballerina’, she simply followed her older sister to ballet lessons, age three, at her local school in small town Rockford in Queensland, Australia.

She consistently got top marks in exams (which she puts this down to her ‘athletic side’) and so began her road to international acclaim. At 16, she was accepted by The Royal Ballet Upper School in London. “They have a class for overseas students but when I arrived they took me into the top class, so I was given a real good chance.” Over the next two years she won a scholarship and two awards.

Benjamin says she’s been lucky in ballet – lucky to be the size she is, lucky not to get too many serious injuries and lucky to still be doing something she loves. But it’s hard to imagine anyone working harder to get where she’s gotten.

“I’m looking forward to watching my son play football and getting a nice steady job. Men have to retire earlier than women in ballet and it’s not exactly well paid. It’s not like the Opera world”

On the subject of nature-nurture, she tells me: “The ideal ballerina would have nice long legs, beautiful feet that can bend back, a supple back, long neck and be attractive in some way. Now that’s not always the case. You can get someone like that who might be weak or lazy and someone whose proportions are not as good but who might be a fast learner, with lots of stage presence and attack in their work. And all ballerinas must have self preservation, drive and determination or they simply won’t succeed.”

Benjamin has all this and more. Her speedy rise in the profession is testimony to her ‘natural’ talent. After three years with The Royal Ballet, she joined Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet aged 19, was promoted to Soloist and Principal shortly after. In 1988, she joined the London Festival Ballet as Principal, the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1990 and finally returned to The Royal Ballet in 1992, becoming a Principal the following year.

On the nurture side, she’s the first to admit an almost unhealthy work ethic. Up until age 39, she was incredibly hard on herself, striving for perfection and never reaching it. Then she got pregnant and took a year out. “I didn’t know whether I’d be able to return afterwards so I sat in the audience and watched a lot. I suddenly realised that all those little worries that you get caught up with, all those technical things, they mattered but what really mattered was someone giving their heart and soul, helping carry the audience away with them. I really strive for that now.”

This isn’t to say she now lets go on stage. “You’re thinking all the time about the corrections you’ve been told in the studio that morning, about being the right distance from your partner. You very rarely let yourself go completely but try to balance the heart with the technique.”