Wendy Ellis Somes was born in Blackburn. She won a British Ballet Organisation scholarship and trained with Peggy Wilson at the Carlotta School of Ballet, later continuing her training at the Royal Ballet School. She joined The Royal Ballet in 1970 and was promoted to Soloist in 1975, then Principal in 1979.

Her talent was such that when still in the corps de ballet she was dancing the Young Girl in The Two Pigeons. She has also danced as Princess Florine in The Sleeping Beauty, and Lise in La Fille mal gardee (a role she was to dance in Warsaw as a guest artist). She went on to dance in all the classical ballets and in such leading roles as Juliet, Aurora, Titania and Cinderella. Other roles included Fairy Spring and Autumn (Cinderella), Golden Hours in Elite Syncopations, Polka in Façade, the pas de trios, amongst others. Sir Kenneth Macmillan created two major roles for Wendy in his ballet, Mayerling.

In 1979, Margot Fonteyn invited her to dance Lise with David Wall for her BBC television series The Magic of Dance, which included footage of rehearsals with her husband Michael Somes (former danseur noble and Assistant Director of The Royal Ballet). That same year Frederick Ashton created the role of the Cauliflower for her in his film Stories from a Flying Trunk (based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Flying Trunk).

After retiring from the Company in 1990 she worked closely with Michael Somes, staging and producing Ashton’s Symphonic Variations and Cinderella, while also gaining a comprehensive understanding and practical experience of staging ballets in the Ashton style. She now owns the intellectual rights to Symphonic Variations and Cinderella and is regarded as an important link in passing down the Ashton tradition. In much demand round the world, she has since staged these ballets in Tokyo, Sweden, New York and Amsterdam. Wendy's new production of Sir Frederick Ashton's Cinderella was performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2003.