Steven Heathcote AM (b. 1964), dancer, is The Australian Ballet's longest-serving principal artist from 1987 to 2007. Heathcote took up dancing at age nine after seeing a production of The Nutcracker by the West Australian Ballet on a school excursion. After training in Perth and at The Australian Ballet School, he joined The Australian Ballet in 1983. From the late 1980s he made guest appearances with companies including the Kirov Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Cuban National Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Kiev Ballet and the Latvian National Ballet. Various top Australian choreographers created parts around him, including Graeme Murphy (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake), Stephen Page (Alchemy, Totem), Natalie Weir (Mirror Mirror) and Stanton Welch (Madame Butterfly, Corroboree, Cinderella). Made a Member of the Order of Australia for his services to dance in 1991, he won three Helpmann awards and two Mo awards. Following his retirement as a dancer in 2007, he appeared in the film Mao's Last Dancer (2009), the television show Dance Academy (2010), directed a new production of Julius Caesar for Victorian Opera, and choreographed Tosca for Opera Australia. Since 2014 he has been Ballet Master at The Australian Ballet.
