DANCE : Grace Under Pressure : The Royal Ballet’s Darcey Bussell is one of today’s hottest ballerinas. Even injury can’t crush her remarkable composure.

Right from the start, Darcey Bussell seemed to be the golden girl. When she was a student at London’s Royal Ballet School, her talent mesmerized the late Kenneth MacMillan, then the Royal’s resident choreographer. MacMillan was famed for the passionate roles he created for some of the century’s most noted ballerinas, and by the time Bussell was 17, it was clear that he intended her to be the next in that illustrious lineup.

At her graduation, she danced in his “Concerto.” Just weeks later, she was already performing soloist roles with the Royal’s sister company, the Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham) Ballet. She stayed there for a single season before being brought into the London company specifically to work with MacMillan. Bussell was the chief inspiration for his seventh and last (he died in 1992) full-length ballet, “The Prince of the Pagodas.” So she left her teens behind with the greatest birthday present a dancer could ever receive--a ballet all her own.

Now 26, Bussell certainly isn’t the only talented ballerina on the Royal roster, but she does happen to be one of those rare dancers whose allure reaches beyond the ballet crowd to capture the imagination of the general public. Stardom fell in her lap, or more appropriately at her feet. What it didn’t do is go to her head. A long-legged beauty with a radiant smile, she’s the affable girl next door whose bubbly personality would encourage you to strike up a conversation with her while waiting at the supermarket checkout.

“The Prince of the Pagodas” set Bussell off on a meteoric trajectory. Her early performances were coltish--reviews cited the instinctive boldness of her attack coupled with her nubile charm--but she’s now matured into a champion thoroughbred, a ballerina whose roles include virtually every big 19th-Century classic as well as the streamlined crackle of George Balanchine’s speedy neoclassical choreography. None of these parts is a more ideal showcase for her talents than “Swan Lake,” which she’ll be dancing Thursday night in the opening performance of the Royal Ballet’s four-day, all “Swan Lake” appearance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (She repeats in the roles Saturday night.)

“It’s my favorite without a doubt,” says Bussell. “It was my first classic. I was only 20 and very lucky to have Margot [Fonteyn, the legendary epitome of a British ballerina] to coach me. She was already quite ill, but she came in for a couple of rehearsals and really made me understand what it was all about. I’ll never forget her saying, ‘You know, you’re not a swan, you’re a woman. You may have arms like wings, but you’re a woman inside.’ I’d never thought of it like that, but suddenly it made so much sense.”

Bussell says that dancing Odette, the delicate and doomed White Swan, is actually more difficult for her than Odile, the glitteringly evil Black Swan. “Soft is hard. You’ve got to be able to convince the audience that you could die at any minute.

“One of the reasons I really love ‘Swan Lake’ is that it’s actually two different roles in one night. When I did ‘The Prince of the Pagodas,’ I was the goody-two-shoes--and you stay that all the way through. But in Swan Lake you get to be everything.”

Bussell was sidelined a year ago, right after the gala Washington premiere of the Royal’s new, radically designed production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” in which she danced the title role. It was a glamorous occasion and the audience, including Princess Margaret and all three of the Clintons, gave the company, and especially Bussell, a rousing ovation. None of the cheering throng saw even a hint of the persistent injury plaguing her, but Bussell was then coping with the excruciating pain of a bone spur that had developed in her ankle. The pain was becoming intolerable, and her doctors decided that surgery was the only long-term solution.

That performance in May, 1994, was her last appearance onstage until the end of October, when she made a comeback in a five-minute pas de deux. It wasn’t until January that she once again was able to dance full-length roles.

Looking back on it, Bussell typically underplays what was a career-threatening situation. “It was a normal operation,” she says, “no problems, no complications. I was off for five months before I started working again. The thing is, I suddenly felt so good that I started going back too quickly. I’m not a very patient person, so I was already in class when basically I shouldn’t have been, and I was compensating for my ankle, which started to cause all sorts of other problems.

“Without thinking about it, I was altering my line--my back, my hips--in order to save my ankle.”

When she realized what was happening she decided it was time to learn how to dance with her head as well as her limbs.

“Before the operation I just got on with it,” she explains. “I’d always been quite strong. I’d done a lot of gymnastics when I was younger, so I had the physique to move fast and I’d always been able to jump and turn. Now, for the first time, I was analyzing what I was doing, trying to learn how my body works and how to look after it, how to minimize the stress.”

It has made her, she says, a more confident dancer, and the added assurance has come just at the right point in her career--there’s no doubt about it, Bussell is now in her prime.

Amazingly for a ballerina whose fame arrived so early, Bussell actually started her ballet training late. She was 13 when she arrived at the Royal Ballet School. “Up till then, I’d only done ballet on Saturday mornings, you know, just to be with my friends.” She says it was only after someone she trusted praised her natural ability that she started to think seriously about dancing as a career.

“But when I got to the school, everybody in my class had already been doing this for two years. I was so far behind I almost gave up, but then I thought ‘Well, if I really want this I better figure out how to catch up.’ That’s when I discovered how challenging and enjoyable it is to really work on things.”

Bussell’s talent has never been in doubt, a fact that was underlined just last month when Bussell did her third guest stint with New York City Ballet. Those mid-June performances were her first in Balanchine’s one-act rendition of “Swan Lake.” The Manhattan audiences were totally captivated. In the New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff championed Bussell’s “stunning mix of sensuality and sweetness” and “the bold clarity of her classical dancing.”

Bussell, like Grace Kelly, knows how to transform immaculate purity into ravishing seductiveness. In addition, she makes it crystal clear that she’s having the time of her life during each performance.

“You’ve got to realize that once you’re out there, it’s only for yourself and the audience. Obviously, you work as hard as possible on your technique, and how to train for a performance; but then, when it actually comes down to it, there’s no more you can do. You’ve got to go out there and enjoy it.

“I do love showing off, and that’s doubtless what performing is. You’re getting enjoyment through the music by showing off your ability, your technique.”

And what about ambition?

“I suppose I am ambitious. I mean I want to make sure that I get the best that I can out of myself.”

And out of her partners. “You have to know that he knows how important the show is to you. When someone’s really working with you and acting with you, you feel safe. That’s when it’s fun to just go for it.”

Not long before her operation, Queen Elizabeth made Bussell an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in her New Year’s Honors List. Bussell is quite young to receive such recognition, and her early OBE puts her on course to become the first dancing Dame since Fonteyn. There have been others ballet Dames in between, but all of them had retired from the stage by the time the honor was bestowed on them.

Bussell is equally young to have her portrait, painted by Allen Jones and unveiled last summer, hanging in London’s National Portrait Gallery. She is the first ballerina to be asked to pose for the National Portrait Gallery since Lynn Seymour, now in her mid-50s, who coincidentally had been MacMillan’s first muse.

The painting, a full-length portrait, shows Bussell wearing a unitard and standing on point. Her body is seen straight on, but her head is in profile. You could call it post-modern Egyptian.

“It’s different,” Bussell says, “but I like it because it is different.” She says she loves the colors, a wash of lush pinks, rich oranges and searing yellows. “My personality is that I like to laugh and he’s brought that out in the colors.”

Beyond such formal recognition, what has cemented her celebrity standing are her numerous, eye-catching fashion spreads in leading magazines. One dazzling feature showcased Bussell as a ballerina-in-ice--decked out in more than $1.5 million worth of diamonds and very little else.

“Those diamonds!” she says. “I mean, when they asked me if I’d do that I remember thinking ‘What’s all the hype about, why all the expense?’ But when I put them on--magic. Suddenly, I thought ‘Wow. They really are worth it.’ ”

Photographers love her, and there was even a recent rumor that she was being considered for the Audrey Hepburn role in the Harrison Ford remake of the movie “Sabrina.” She readily admits to enjoying her fame, the media attention, and the chances she’s had to impress, but she doesn’t see herself becoming a ballet diva a la Sylvie Guillem or Gelsey Kirkland. After all, she drives a Jeep, lives just down the street from her mom and wouldn’t dream of being late for anything.

“I don’t think, for me, I’d like to have that superstar sort of image. You see, the best thing about dance is that you’re a different person in each piece. You don’t want to be Darcey Bussell in ‘Swan Lake.’ You don’t want to be Darcey Bussell in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ You want to be Odette. You want to be Juliet. That’s the most challenging bit for me.”

Even so, she can’t deny that audiences turn up at Covent Garden, Lincoln Center and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion because they want to see Darcey Bussell.

“I do like to think that perhaps I could get ballet known and really popular again. I mean, it would be great if people took to it through me, if they came to see me and that made them want to come back to the ballet again. That would be the nicest thing of all.”*