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Emotions are running high for Elena Roger. The Argentine actress is delighted to have won the role of Eva Peron in the Webber-Rice reinvention of Evita, but she is pining for her life and loves back in Buenos Aires. Jane Gordon passes the tissues.
It isn't difficult to make Elena Roger cry.
Mention her mother or even her mother country and the unexpectedly pale blue eyes of the 31-year-old Argentine actress fill with tears.
"I'm sorry, she says when asked how her parents reacted to the news that she had won the coveted role of Evita in a new Pounds 3.5 million reinvention of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical, but I always cry when I feel I have to cry, and my mother is the same. She had two different sensations when I told her I had won the role. One was, '"I am so proud of you,' and the other was, '"Why do you have to go to another country for a year?' We both cried and it makes me cry again when I think about it"
Elena was chosen for the part after an exhaustive search that covered three continents and involved a series of auditions in London last autumn (among her many distinguished rivals were Broadway star Eden Espinosa and our own Denise Van Outen). "I came over in September and again in October and then again for the final auditions in January. I was very nervous, not only because of my English but also because I really didn't know all the songs. After the last audition the director Michael Grandage came to my dressing room and told me I'd got the part. It was fantastic," she says, a hint of a tear returning to those eyes.
It's said that Elena stood out at the auditions because she did not, as some of the other actresses did, attempt to imitate Elaine Paige in the original 1978 production or Madonna in the 1996 film. Instead Elena concentrated on portraying Eva Perón Argentine postwar leader Juan Perón's wife, who died of cancer in 1952 at the age of 33 as a real, rounded character rather than as an idealised heroine.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1974 around the time that Lloyd Webber and Rice conceived the original album that would become the musical Evita Elena was the youngest of three children of her salesman father and housewife mother.
They are, she says with a wistful smile, a united family (her brother and sister will be flying over for the opening night in June). All three children were musical (her brother Sergio, 39, is a musician, while her sister Amalia, 36, is an Italian teacher), but it was Elena's love of and talent for dancing that eventually led her to a career as a musical actress. She studied piano and voice at the city's conservatoire and gained her first role shortly after graduating, eventually establishing herself through roles in Les Misérables and Beauty and the Beast as one of her country's leading stage stars.
The new production will be more authentically Argentine, with new dance sequences, music and a Latin American feel that will, the producers hope, have a fresh appeal for audiences almost 30 years on from the original staging. Elena is very much aware of the responsibility of portraying Eva, a woman who is still revered in her country in the way that the British revere Princess Diana.
"People in Argentina are still very emotional about Eva. Some hate her and some love her.
My own family was divided in their opinion. My father's side were Peronists, but my mother's family were socialists and had a different view.
My maternal grandfather had left Italy because he feared what would happen under the regime of Mussolini, so when Perón won power he worried that he too would be an oppressive dictator. Perón was like a lion but he wasn't another Mussolini. They say in my country that he was a lion that did not like blood," she says in her delightful fractured English.
For the women of Elena's generation Eva is, she points out with a gentle smile, a formidable role model who was responsible for pushing through the legislation that finally gave Argentine women the vote in 1947. Eva's rags-to-riches story she was born into poverty and became an actress before marrying Perón and assuming power at his side remains an inspiration to young Argentine women.
"Eva was an unusual woman for her time.
Although there had been a suffragette movement among a group of intellectual rich women since the turn of the 20th century, it was Eva who showed the way. One of my aunts, who worked in a factory, told me: 'When we were young we thought Eva was a whore. But when she began to devote her life to helping people, we loved her.'"
The reverberations of the women's movement are still being felt by Elena's generation in Buenos Aires. "This change is difficult for all of us, she says. I was talking with a group of girlfriends the other day and one of them said, 'When I was 20 I thought that I would have children by the time I was 25, but now that I am 30 I have a good job and I don't know that I want to have a baby.' I am the same. I want to have babies, but I have to pursue my career. It is difficult for the men, too, because they feel as if they have lost their power and that they are no longer important in their women's lives."
This is particularly true for Elena, who has not only left her beloved family behind in Argentina, but has also left her boyfriend Javier, 30, a musician, who will be joining her in London shortly. The couple have been living together in the Baracas district (just round the corner from her family) for two years, and while Javier is thrilled with her success, it will be difficult for him to uproot himself.
"I met him when he was playing the guitar in a show I was appearing in. He is a good man and I speak to him every day, but he has never travelled to Europe before and he is moving to this country for me, so it is an important time for us. I hope it will work out and that perhaps in a year we will be married, she says, running a hand nervously through her titian hair (which, she says with a giggle, is naturally 'pure mouse').
Their marriage, she points out, will be very different from that of her own parents, who were much more bound by the religious conventions of a Catholic country. "My parents have a good marriage. They love each other, but they are from a different generation, and for them it was a contract he would work in the world and she would work in the house. With Javier and me it is different. If I am working and he isn't, he will cook and clean; if he is working and I am not, then I will." While Elena waits for Javier to join her (he has just gained a permit to work here), she has to content herself with long telephone calls to him.
She has daily contact, too, with her family.
"I speak to my mother most days and she is learning how to send emails. It was a very different thing when my grandmother left Italy in the 1940s she was only able to keep in touch with letters and she wasn't able to return home until the late 70s for her mother's funeral. Communication is fabulous now: we can email, they can travel to see me, I can travel to see them. And it's only for a year initially," she says, her voice again brimming with emotion.
There is talk of the show transferring to Broadway after the first year (something that excites Elena), but for now she is concentrating on adjusting to her new life in London. It is, she says, a city that she loves almost as much as Buenos Aires. As well as her trips over here for the auditions and her performance on Parkinson in March she once spent three months in London performing with an Argentine theatre group.
"Being in London for me now is like going to my uncle's house. It is very familiar". Endearingly open (she talks of how nervous she is about her new role) and delightfully engaging, she has a strong sense of her identity.
Tiny, with the waif-like physique of a dancer, she is, she points out with another infectious laugh, stronger than she appears. "Sometimes I feel very small to get so big a part. I am very thin now because of my nerves and I plan to gain two more kilos before the first night. I am a little woman but I have a big voice." Elena has performed the inspirational song from the show, 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina', twice in public since winning the role. The first time accompanied only by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber on the piano at a press launch for the show and the second with a full orchestra on Parkinson.
Any doubts anyone had about the wisdom of casting an actress largely unknown outside her native Argentina in such a huge role were dispelled within the first few bars (it's said that even Sir Andrew had to suppress a sniffle).
It might not be difficult to make the delightful and emotionally volatile Elena cry when you talk to her (she has been brushing back the tears throughout our interview), but will she be able to produce the same emotions on stage every night? "I don't know if every night I can cry, but surely the first night I can cry."
© Associated Newspapers Ltd.
