KEY POINTS:
You are seriously deprived if you have not experienced Julia Migenes as Carmen in Francesco Rosi's 1984 film of the Bizet opera.
Visiting Auckland to give us her one-woman show Diva on the Verge, the American soprano stresses how grateful she is for the exposure the film gave her.
"There are so many really great singers but one doesn't know about them because they don't get to do a film," she explains. "The film industry can make you immediately visible. I had the luck to be asked to do it, and it's a role that suits my way of being and my acting, although it took me a year to bring my voice down to the mezzo range."
Her laugh is certainly a generous mezzo, betraying both her theatricality and her Greek-Irish-Puerto Rican background.
Although she has been in big productions such as the Parisian premiere of Peter Eotvos' operatic version of Angels in America, she is not always lucky enough to be "alongside those full-blooded stage animals that make you enjoy being on stage".
"If I am with the kind who are counting till they sing and looking at a spot on your forehead, glued to the conductor, then I'd rather just be alone."
There are other advantages in writing your own one-woman shows.
"You feel independent, and you know what you can do. Sometimes you are in something and you're only using a bit of your talent because of the role or even because of the staging."
With talents that stretch from high coloratura to low mezzo and from tango to tap dancing, Migenes is an artist blessed. "I am married to my voice," she confides, "but my lover is dancing and I sneak away to do it."
The inspiration for tomorrow night's Diva on the Verge came from explaining the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor to a bewildered Gary Oldman and Uma Thurman by adding an English translation as she went; they were working at the time with film director Tony Scott, Migenes' fourth husband.
"I was translating and singing, translating and singing and, by the time I was done, we were all in total laughter. I realised there was potential there; why not present opera by making it a little funny and tongue-in-cheek?"
Migenes insists opera does not get a fair innings with the media.
"People have tunnel vision. The radio and TV play hip-hop, popular music and the occasional musical comedy and that's it.
"And now music is out of the [American] school curriculum which is the worst of crimes.
"These are serious issues. I feel every type of music can echo an emotion in somebody and to completely withhold composers like Debussy, Rachmaninov, Schubert and Schumann from anyone is sad."
Ironically, the best quality music young people hear is in the movie houses. "If you listen to half the film scores, they are comparatively classical," Migenes insists. "So they are listening to quasi-classical music subliminally while Bruce Willis is charging through the building with a firehose or something."
On Friday the orchestra will be supplied by Victoria Hirsch's versatile piano as Migenes presents a diverting catalogue of operatic follies and foibles.
One highlight is the scene in which Tosca murders Scarpia with the original stage directions read out aloud. "They're hilarious," Migenes points out, "as they show the old-fashioned acting of those times and my pianist supplies Scarpia's cries and screams."
Migenes is a woman of wit and flamboyant with it. On stage she might sum up Salome as "a biblical teenager from hell"; for my benefit she comes up with a riotously funny take on Pavarotti trying to shunt his mammoth voice around Henry Mancini's Moon River.
Her advice to the legendary Three Tenors? "Croon, guys, croon!"
For Migenes herself, tomorrow night, it is top Cs, cantilena and coloratura as the American diva takes us all the way to the operatic verge and back again.
