Touring the world with tigers

Now the year is 2007. The setting: Dollywood, the Tennessee home and entertainment complex created by Dolly Parton. The same girl with the same eyes and smile is appearing in the same illusionist's act. She steps into an identical booth in front of a packed, enthusiastic audience. Almost a quarter of a century has passed and little or nothing has changed about her. Could this be the greatest illusion of all?

The men behind this show are the two Fercos brothers. They bill themselves, not without good reason, as the world's top animal illusionist act. Yet can anything else in the Fercos repertoire top this feat? How has the girl remained unchanged throughout those three decades?

The answer, of course, as with all the best illusionists' acts, is that she is a double - or near double. The lady who wowed them in the1980s is now sitting in the audience. The two dead-ringers are mother and daughter, reunited as history repeats itself across the generations.

That performance and reunion in Tennessee happened this year, in July. It provided a sort of happy ending to a showbiz story that has seen its share of adversity as well as much in the way of triumph and glamour.

The key figure in the tale is Julia Hantig, who lives in Baxter Avenue, Southend. She currently works in sales for Clinton Cards. Julia has a capacity for making new friends among customers and workmates. "I enjoy the job - I like meeting people," she says. No doubt her stop-'em-in-their-tracks smile helps too.

Those new friends are in for a surprise when they find out about Julia's past. The Southend sales-lady is a one time lead dancer, fashion model and TV actress. She has danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the Dunes in Las Vegas. It was she who shared a box with a tiger for eight years. That was in another world and another life. Since then she has raised her two daughters as a single mum. Now she has her reward.

Early this year, Julia said goodbye to her elder daughter and watched as she headed off across the Atlantic in search of the big time. Like her mum, Juliet Hantig, 22, is a dancer, trained at the London Theatre School. Her target is Los Angeles and she is bent on joining the Pussycat Dolls.

Partings can be tough, and Julia knows, better than most, that the world into which her daughter was heading has its perils as well as its excitements. As she watched Juliet depart into the blue yonder, it would have been odd if she hadn't felt some trepidation. But as always she drew on deep reserves of stage-honed toughness and resilience. "Your children lives are their own," she rationalises. "A parent only has a brief tenancy."

On her way to the Pacific coast, Juliet took up an invitation. The road to Hollywood lay via Dollywood. "She joined her father, my ex-husband, and took on my old role," says Julia. "It was only a temporary arrangement, to make some money before she reaches LA. But, I've seen her, and even allowing for a proud mum's reaction, she's a natural."

Julia is able to speak from first-hand experience because soon after Juliet's departure, a package dropped through the Southend letterbox. It hailed from Juliet, and contained an airline ticket to Atlanta, paid for from Julia's earnings.

So Julia made a journey back to her own past - back to the world that she walked away from in 1992, when she made a deliberate move back to her roots in Essex. But while she herself was strong-willed enough to turn her back on the bright lights, there was no bucking the performing gene. It has re-emerged in Juliet and it has passed to Julia's younger daughter, Crystal as well. Crystal is now a student at the Tiffany college.

Juliet's exposure to the stage began before she could walk or talk. "We were performing in Malaysia, and she watched me on stage, sitting in a high-chair," Julia recalls.

Julia herself first recognised her destiny when she was almost as young . "I was three when I started ballet and I knew that I was going to be a dancer," she says. "I never ever thought of doing anything else."

Born Julia Yallop and raised in Grays, she trained at the Bush Davies school. At 18 she won her first job, dancing can-can at the legendary Moulin Rouge, in Paris. "They used to like English girls because of our sense of discipline," Julia recalls. "There were so many of us in the line-up that we used to say it wasn't the French can-can at all but the English Can-Can."

In the early 70s she moved to South America, working in Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. She lived with one of the country's leading film-actors, and took on high-profile modelling and film assignments. "I was regarded as an up and coming star over there," she says, "though none of the material ever appeared in England, and my then boy-friend is unknown here."

After six years she broke up with her actor boy-friend and moved on to Las Vegas and Reno. It was here that she met her husband, Ferdinand Hantig, known as Ferco.

Ferdinand and his brother Tony were members of an old middle European circus family. The pair had escaped to the west from Czechoslovakia, then an Iron Curtain country. A natural with animals, Ferco had devised an extraordinary act that mixed tigers, lions, leopards and panthers with traditional magic tricks.

The brothers married within the same year. Tony's bride, US-born Virginia, was also a professional dancer.

"It made sense for Virginia and me to become part of the act," Julia says. "It kept it as a family act, and as dancers were were ideal for the role."

While based in Las Vegas, the extended Ferco family travelled the world. They took in France, Italy, Spain, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, as well as Madison Square Garden in New York.

The moments of onstage glamour were just a small part of the show. The real labour took place offstage. Julia and Virginia looked after much of the logistics work involved in transporting several tons of equipment around the world. They tended to the animals. They checked the scenery and equipment on each new stage. They also had to practice old routines and learn new ones.

There was also another consideration. By 1985 Julia and Virginia had four children between them. "We had a contract in Reno and i went back to work when Crystal was just six weeks old," Julia recalls. "I was breast feeding between shows."

Looking back on that heady but gruelling period, Julia concludes simply: "I don't know how we did it."

A 1988 press interview with Julia and Virginia hints that the strain was beginning to tell. The article is intended to be a celebration of the Fercos act, but the sisters-in-law drop their guard. Virginia tells the reporter, almost beseechingly: "The children need a rock - something they can cling to. They just need a home where they can go to school and grow up... It was hard adjusting to a new lifestyle with the brothers. They were used to travelling and living out of trailers."

Four years later, it was all over. Julia left her luxury home in Las Vegas ("I never saw much of it anyway") and took her children home to her parents in south Essex. She and Ferco were divorced. "He wanted me to go to Seoul with him, but I'd had enough," Julia says."I was exhausted. I didn't want to travel any more."

Above all, Julia wanted a stable life for her two girls. "You've got to be a responsible parent," she says. "You can't have a long-distance relationship with your children. In the end, I was simply more passionate about my children than my career in show business.

"It's been a struggle being a single mum without much money. But you make your decision, right or wrong, and you stand by it."

Julia had one last taste of the old life when she visited Juliet in Dollywood. Knowing that she was in the audience, Ferco invited her on stage and introduced her as a former member of the act.

Surely she misses the old life, at least a bit? Julia's answer is carefully considered.

"A friend asked me what I considered my biggest achievement. I said, my children. They mean more to me than anything else I've done. Now all I wish for is their happiness and success. Watching Juliet on stage, I never once felt that I wanted to be in her place.

"I had a wonderful time in showbiz while it lasted. I know I'm blessed, when you consider what the business can be like and what it does to some people.

"Peole at work say, 'after all you've done, what are you doing here?' I just say, there are different stages in life."

Perhaps, for Julia Hantig, the next stage is as a role model for us all in rolling with life's punches. But for all her stoicism, she adds with a touch of wistfulness: "When they're in Vegas with their father, people do tell the girls: 'God, but your mother was a good dancer.' "

Yet the dancing at least hasn't stopped. It was in Julia's blood from the moment she was born, and it will never go away. It may no longer be her job, but it remains her mainstay.

"When I'm down or things aren't going right, I do my dance exercises and then I'm happy again," she says. "Dancing never ever goes away or lets you down. Once a dancer always a dancer."