Character profile: Gregoire Lecroix - French - male ballet dancer - character trait: needy

Gregoire Lecroix rolled the smooth Lycra stocking up his long lithe leg and frowned. There was a tiny hole in the stocking, just below the knee. They'd have to go in the bin. He sighed in exasperation. Each pair of the tights, which had to be specially designed to fit his six foot frame, cost several hundred euros. He could remember a time not so long ago when a hundred euros seemed Iike a fortune, yet here he was throwing money away on tights. He'd come a long way from his humble beginnings. Born to a single mother in a small rural village in the middle of France, he and his four sisters had been bullied mercilessly at school, told they were smelly, dirty, bastard children. None of them knew who their father was, or even if they had the same father, but somehow it had never mattered. His mother had done her best to bring up her children, though her best was often not good enough, and some days there had been barely enough bread on the table to feed them all. Gregoire had struggled through school and left at fourteen unable to read or write. He'd hitchhiked his way to Paris and spent several weeks on the street, where his talent for dancing kept the other homeless people entertained and earned him enough from passers by to stave away the hunger. And then one day he'd been spotted by Monique Du Pont, director of the Paris School of Ballet, and life had never been the same again.