LOS ANGELES, Sept. 23 — When Cheryl Burke traded in her ballet slippers for a ballroom dancing outfit at age 11, it was not because she anticipated performing one day for a weekly audience of 20 million people.
A dozen years later Ms. Burke, 23, has become one of the biggest draws on ABC’s hit reality series “Dancing With the Stars.” The show, which starts its fifth season on Monday night, pairs professional ballroom dancers with celebrities and has them compete in the fox trot, tango, paso doble and other traditional routines. Its estimated weekly viewership of 20 million people last year was second only to “American Idol.”
That has made Ms. Burke, a winner of the competition two of the four seasons she has appeared on the show, as recognizable as any professional dancer in the United States. Certainly she has become more of a star than some of the ex-boy-band singers and obscure sitcom actors who have joined with the professionals.
In addition to showing up regularly on the red carpet at Hollywood premieres, Ms. Burke no longer goes unrecognized in airports. Her Web site, strictlycheryl.com, draws adoring notes from fans, and she has gone from never having read, she said, a celebrity tabloid to having her preference for thong underwear chronicled by Women’s Wear Daily.
The popularity of “Dancing With the Stars,” an import version of the international television hit “Strictly Come Dancing,” has surprised even executives at ABC, some of whom were reluctant to embrace the series when it started as a summer replacement in 2005.
At that time Ms. Burke, who is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, was living in New York. She was training with a ballroom dance partner at a studio on West 42nd Street, not far from the giant screen on the facade of the ABC studios building in Times Square that regularly spotlighted clips from the first season of “Dancing.”
“People in the ballroom world thought it was kind of cheesy,” she said of her first impressions of the program. “I had seen the show, but I really wanted to focus on competition dancing.” Though she had won some titles, including World Cup Professional Rising Star Latin Champion in 2005, “I still hadn’t reached my goal of becoming a world champion.”
But she also had been unlucky with partners, she said. She was approached to audition for the show about the same time that her last partner and boyfriend decided to pull back from professional competition. That led Ms. Burke to decide that the move to Los Angeles for the show might do her good.
One recent afternoon in Beverly Hills, Ms. Burke, wearing a maroon halter dress, flip-flops and new shoulder-length hair extensions instead of ballroom-dance regalia, looked supremely relaxed, every bit like a Southern California aspiring television star. She also looked far younger than she does on television, particularly without the heavy, circuslike makeup that the ballroom profession seems to demand.
Though she was prepared upon joining the show to teach a neophyte partner the basics of the ballroom world, she was not prepared for the level of scrutiny. Rehearsals are taped, partners are given special activities to do to provide footage of them in “actual life” settings, and after each show the competitors face a gantlet of cameras from television tabloid shows like “Extra” and “Entertainment Tonight.”
Conrad Green, executive producer of “Dancing With the Stars,” said Ms. Burke underwent a noticeable personal transformation beginning in her first season.
“Her confidence increased a lot,” he said. “She always had enormous charisma as a dancer, but she was shy. She wasn’t the Cheryl that we know now.”
Ms. Burke credits much of that transformation to Drew Lachey, a former member of the pop group 98 Degrees who was Ms. Burke’s first partner on the show. “He would help me out with the cameras,” she said. Conversely, Mr. Lachey said that he benefited from the fact that, having just come from the world of professional competition, “she was very much into strict, formal rehearsals.”
The combination worked, with Ms. Burke and Mr. Lachey winning the show’s second edition. The next season Ms. Burke teamed with Emmitt Smith, the former professional football star, and they also won. Last spring she finished in fourth place with Ian Ziering, an actor from “Beverly Hills 90210.”
The pace is grueling. After each professional dancer is paired with a celebrity, they spend about four weeks learning basic steps and practicing for their first performance. If they make it past the first round, the intensity grows, with each team having just a week to choreograph and learn first one dance, then, later in the competition, two dances for each performance. By the middle of the competition, partners are working seven days a week and as many as eight hours a days.
The coming season is likely to be considerably different for Ms. Burke, whose partners have been progressively older over the seasons. Mr. Lachey was 29 at the time the couple won, Mr. Smith was 37, and Mr. Ziering was 42. This fall Ms. Burke is paired with Wayne Newton, 65.
Though she has bought Mr. Newton’s signature 1963 song “Danke Schoen,” Ms. Burke admits that she did not know much about him. That’s not unusual, she said: “I lived in a bubble as a kid.” Indeed, she had to Google Emmitt Smith to learn who he was.
“Wayne and I are taking it a lot slower” than she has with other partners, she said, at first keeping their rehearsals to two hours a day. “But he is a performer, and he assures me that when it comes time to perform, he is able to turn it on.”
