Michele Hewitson Interview: Helen Medlyn

Diva Helen Medlyn has never made enough money to buy a house. Photo / Chris Gorman

Singer Helen Medlyn is playing the heartless Widow Corney in the Auckland Theatre Company's production of Oliver! She is the widow who sings, about poor Oliver: "Won't ask for more when he knows what's in store!" Which she will no doubt embellish with her usual comic flair. So I thought, "oh good, a chance to interview her".

She is a self-professed diva, so she ought to be rather grand and very loud. She wanted to meet at Tony's Steak House, so I thought I'd better make sure it was okay to take pictures. It was fine, although the manager did think it amusing that Helen Mirren would be coming for a sirloin. That was, obviously, a slip of the tongue. The other Helen, when I told her, was much tickled by this. "I'd like to be as good as her toenail!"

Then she showed off her green, pointy boots. "Fish skin! Aren't they neat? Heaven on a stick!" She said about her Widow Corney costume: "It's bosoms for Africa!" She is much more fun that you can imagine Miss Mirren being.

The reason I thought, 'oh good, etc," is because I have met her once before, at a bit of a do. There were plenty of larger-than-life characters at that do, but she entranced me by out-performing the lot of them. It is true that she was loud. But grand? She can, and does say "darling", frequently. But acty people do. She is capable of the grand gesture, on stage, and off.

It is also true there were quantities of plonk consumed, but we had barely been introduced before she began lamenting, loudly, her lack of a love life.

This is not, generally speaking, the sort of thing you want to hear from somebody you've just met. But she was wonderfully funny, and horrifyingly candid, about her lack of ability to get a bloke. I thought then that she was putting on a bit of a one-woman autobiographical show, but who could mind when it was such an entertaining one?

So I thought we'd have a jolly time; that an interview with her would be an extension of that one woman show she put on at the bit of a do.

She was looking forward to a steak and a glass of wine. So was I. But because she and the rest of the cast have been called back to a late rehearsal she can't have a glass of wine, and she won't have a meal. Surely she could still have something to eat? No, she said, she'd feel bad because nobody else would have eaten. "They [the cast] are working straight through and so it's just unity."

This seems excessively selfless, especially as she hadn't, until recently, had a steak for years. Her dad was a butcher and she grew up in butcher's shops and had been to abattoirs but she wasn't put off until she and her mum watched a TV documentary called the Vegetarian World, hosted by William Shatner - "who I adored from Star Trek". The topside roast was in the oven, mother and daughter were watching "animals being killed in the most disgusting way and dad came in from the garden, "going, 'ooh, meat', and we were both sitting ashen faced." And she didn't eat meat for 25 years until recently after she went to a restaurant, saw steak on the menu, and thought, "that's the only thing I want to eat." She didn't have it then, but later bought a bit of meat, cooked it and thought, "delicious!"

I think this is an odd story. Why would she suddenly decide to eat meat again? She's just treated me to a funny, if gruesomely bang on impression of animals dying horribly. "It was just what my body wanted. I'm a great believer in following my body and my soul and ... the universe. It's just who I am."

I'd have lied to the cast and had the steak but she wouldn't. She is unflinchingly honest, to a degree that me flinch for her. I kept saying, "really!" She said, "you keep saying 'really', as though you don't believe me!" Of course I believed her. It's just that she tells you things and you think, 'I can't believe she's telling me this'.

She is good fun, but she is also a serious, thoughtful person, given to sudden tears (about her grandfather, who she adored) and solemn utterances that I'm ashamed to admit made me laugh. She wears her heart, and her vulnerabilities, on her sleeve. She is also very sweet, so I shouldn't have snorted when she said "I'm a great believer in the universe", and "it was one of those cosmic moments".

I said these were acty things to say, and what was the universe?

I'm sorry I did because she looked a bit hurt and said, "I don't know. It's bigger than me. That's what I believe."

Within minutes of sitting down, she was telling me what I thought was a terrible story (I kept saying 'really!') about a director who, in 1985, told her, in front of a cast, that "I couldn't dance, I couldn't act, I couldn't sing, I couldn't do anything. He just didn't see any talent, so he told me".

Most people would have taken to their bed. "I didn't do that. I carried on and did the job." She didn't work again, in the entertainment business, for three years. "If somebody says that about you, you go, 'well, it must be true'." She was working in advertising at the time, so she kept on with that, gave up the stage, despite having taken to it at the age of eight. Then three years later, with no prospects, she decided she didn't want to work in advertising any longer, and quit.

That was on a Friday. On the Monday director Raymond Hawthorne (who is now directing her in Oliver) called from the Mercury Theatre and offered her a role. This was the universe providing. "Well, it was another door opening and, you're going to laugh at me again, but I thought that was created for me. I would be 31 [then] and I just felt like somebody believed in me again."

I'm still reeling from the horrid director story, but she's not a grudge bearer. She says she's a real Pollyanna, and she really is. She says she loves Oliver because it's a "feel-good story, hope springs eternal, love will conquer all. I love that".

Hope must spring eternal. She has never made enough money to buy a house. She'd never even rented a place until three months ago. She's lived in other people's houses for 25 years. "I've lived with friends, I've looked after houses, I've stayed in winter houses in the summer or summer houses in the winter." She thinks she possibly needed a place of her own at last because her mother died on Christmas Eve and, "I don't know. I felt sort of uprooted. Maybe it's like taking responsibility for yourself. You're going to laugh at me again, but it felt right in my soul."

I'm not going to laugh at her. I did think she'd be a bit nutty, and I still think that. But she's more interesting than a sketch of a slightly eccentric diva would provide. She's a loner who doesn't go out much but who people think is a larger than life character. She likes reading but she also loves big motorbikes and helicopters and motorsport and trucks. "I just love the muscularity of those engines, the sound of them, the power of them. I think it's the freedom of speed."

She worries a bit about money because of the sporadic income of the jobbing entertainer, and that her voice might go, or people might stop wanting to hear her. And, at 51, she worries about her retirement. She's signed up to become a celebrant. Because I'm now worried (more worried than her, probably) about her having no money, I'm going to give her a plug: She'll be a fabulous celebrant and you should book her immediately.

I don't want to make her out to be any sort of sad sack, because she's certainly not that. Still, I did say, after she talked about how she had, at times, been tempted to give it all up, and about the constant battle for money, that this all sounded a bit bleak. "Oh, no!" she said, "I think every artist thinks, 'gosh, this is a bit hard'. And I love making people happy."

But is she a diva? Not much of one, I decide, after an hour with her. Yet I knew she was capable of putting on the act. "A diva to me is what I do. Not the connotation of a drama queen. People call me a diva, which is a girl who sings on the stage and gives you all on the stage but when she comes off stage, she'd love somebody just to love the really ordinary girl who just happens to have an extraordinary job."

Which brings us back to our earlier meeting when she was, I remind her, lamenting, loudly, the lack of her love life. "Still lamenting!" she says cheerfully. Then, "hey, I'm on a dating site!" Really? "Of course. A lot of people are. You'd be astonished."

I hope she gets a bloke, and some more money (I'll be having a stern word with that universe), and I hope we get to have that steak some other time. She was good and generous company. But I did rather wonder where that character I'd met at the bit of a do had gone.

"I suppose at after-match functions I try to be a scintillating conversationalist and flirt outrageously and be entertaining. I feel that's still part of my job, in a way. But that's not me."

She said next time she'd come as Helen Mirren. "Or Helen Medlyn. But then people would be disappointed."

Now that I don't believe.