HIS CURSE ROLLS out in this long caressing drawl, still rich with the accent of Latvia. 'Oh my God-d-d-d-d.' Mikhail Baryshnikov is limbering up for another hated press interview. The thing is they bore him. The thing is he's said it all. And so many times. When you're the world's most famous living ballet dancer and you've thrown yourself into life the way he has, there's a lot that you simply can't leave behind. And that, notoriously, irritates him.
The hottest item of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet's romantic prince who, aged 26, didn't so much grand jete as frantically sprint to freedom in the West, the bantamweight ballet dancer whose pin-up looks and Casanova lifestyle mesmerised every bit as much as his impeccable dance technique - Baryshnikov has seen his own life story in print too many times.
He wants to move on and won't entertain nostalgia. But then he will keep on talking. 'Oh my God,' says Baryshnikov with a heavy sigh, 'that was so many years ago and I never bought that fame stuff - I took all that attention with a healthy dose of irony. I knew perfectly well my own value. You pretty much know what you did and why you did it.'
It's all nonsense, he snorts. 'I live my life and that's all that matters, [stardom] did not affect me at all. Nothing has changed in my life.'
He, you quickly realise, is clearly given to laughable understatement. These days, on the surface at least, there is a very different Baryshnikov from the once moody man-about-town. He is a happy, easy-going, relaxed family man, living outside Manhattan near the Hudson River with former ballerina Lisa Rinehart, their three school-age children and a houseful of dogs. He plays golf, smokes cigars, has made millions from his perfume line, movie appearances in Shirley MacLaine's The Turning Point and White Knights (1985) and his total of 13 years at the American Ballet Theatre (ABT).
But this now deeply lined, bespectacled, reflective 52-year-old was the golden-locked, blue-eyed boy who danced in the 70s and 80s before capacity audiences screaming maniacally for more, who stunned with his athleticism and theatricality, who danced in galas with Merce Cunningham, starred on TV with former lover Liza Minelli, was nominated for an Oscar in The Turning Point, and dated a string of famous women - actresses Jessica Lange (with whom he had a child), Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Lewis, dancers Gelsey Kirkland and Cheryl Yeager, and prima ballerina Natalia Makarova.