When Julie Goodwin was asked to go on Dancing With The Stars Australia, she laughed.
“I said, ‘Oh no, no – it’s so lovely of you to ask me, but I don’t dance,’” MasterChef Australia’s very first winner – in 2009 – tells TV WEEK. “I fall over just standing randomly on the corner. I’m really, really, really uncoordinated.”
Somehow, Julie was persuaded to say yes – and, once she was committed, she was committed. She upped her gym sessions to get as fit as possible before she started training with her partner, Russian dance champion Andrey Gorbunov.
“I was going to the gym about five times a week and swimming about three or four times a week,” the 53-year-old explains. “I felt really good.”
She also made sure she was eating healthily.
“Every time I saw a cake, I thought, ‘If I eat that, poor Andrey has to pick that up as well!’” she says.
The training didn’t start out promisingly, with Julie falling up the stairs to the dance studio on her first three days, and treading on Andrey’s toes repeatedly.
“At one point, I trod on my own foot,” she remembers.
But they persisted, and Julie found herself doing moves she couldn’t have imagined ever doing.
“When Andrey said, ‘There’ll be a couple of lifts in this dance,’ I said to him, ‘I don’t know if I can pick you up,’” she says with a laugh. “I definitely didn’t think he could pick me up, but they gave me someone very strong.”
Julie and Andrey became close friends, with Andrey spending time at Julie and her husband Mick’s home on the NSW Central Coast.
“Andrey came to the footy, he and his partner came to our house for dinner, he came around for swims on hot days,” she says. “When we weren’t dancing, we were hanging out.”
Julie, who has three adult sons and a three-year-old granddaughter, Delilah, has also been busy recently touring Australia to promote her memoir, Your Time Starts Now. In it, she opens up about her struggles with mental health, which has led to a lot of people wanting to tell her their own stories.
“It’s a privilege to have people share that with me,” she says. “It’s made the writing of that book – which was very hard – worthwhile.”
As for what’s next, Julie’s just taking things as they come.
“I’m not overwhelmed anymore,” she says. “I don’t know what’s around the corner – and that’s OK, because I didn’t know MasterChef was around the corner and look what happened there. It’s all been a grand adventure, really.”
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