There are interviews where you switch on the recorder, settle into your chair and simply get down to business. And then there are those where you have to quietly keep your inner fangirl in check. Interviewing Caroline O’Connor was definitely the latter. I was also delighted to discover that, along with a shared love of the stage, we have something else in common – our Irish heritage!
For anyone who loves musical theatre, Caroline is something of a legend. From Broadway and London’s West End to the biggest stages across Australia, she has built an extraordinary career playing some of theatre’s most memorable women, from Velma Kelly in Chicago to Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes.
She has won three Helpmann Awards, been nominated for an Olivier Award and appeared in films including Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!. Yet when speaking to her, there is very little sense of the diva. Instead, there is warmth, humour, curiosity and an infectious enthusiasm for the thing she has spent her life doing.
“I love all of it,” she tells me. “When I’m on stage I feel completely at home.”
And perhaps that is the secret to a career that has taken her around the world. She never really planned it. In fact, when Caroline first discovered musical theatre, she admits she knew little about how to make a career from it.
Born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Irish parents, she was the youngest of four children. Her three siblings were born in Ireland before the family moved to England, and she grew up in Sydney after migrating to Australia.
Caroline began Irish dancing as a child and went on to study at London’s prestigious The Royal Ballet School, as well as training in tap, jazz and other forms of dance. But while dancing was something she knew she could do, singing was different.
Looking back, though, there were clues. As a child, she would listen to her parents’ records and secretly sing along to the great musicals and singers of the day. Her mother even found old cassette tapes of Caroline singing as a 10- or 11-year-old along to songs from Gypsy, A Chorus Line and other musicals, trying to match the singers’ notes and timing.
“I think it’s hilarious because obviously some part of me really loved that,” she says.
The breakthrough came almost by accident. Caroline went along to an audition for Oklahoma! when the production needed a swing replacement (someone who steps in if someone is absent).
Her preparation was hardly textbook.
“I knew so little about how to approach musical theatre,” she says.
For her audition, she sang I Got Rhythm — a song she had learned from a That’s Entertainment album she listened to constantly.
“It was totally inappropriate,” she laughs. “But it worked.”
What followed has been a career most performers could only dream about. But Caroline is quick to point out that she never set out with a carefully mapped-out plan. If anything, her philosophy has been to just say ‘yes’.
That attitude has led to roles which have tested her in completely different ways. She has played real-life icons including Edith Piaf and Judy Garland, characters that require more than simply learning lines and songs.
“I do a lot of research with characters, whether they’re fictional or real,” she says. “Just because I want to really try and inhabit them.”
“It’s much harder when you have to play people that really existed. The responsibility is tremendous.”
Caroline didn’t even speak French when she took on the role of Piaf. She simply said yes, then did the work. “I went to a tutor for four months before I started rehearsals,” she says. “I really do my homework.”
It is an approach that perhaps explains why some of her performances have stayed with audiences for so long. For me, her portrayal of Velma Kelly in Chicago remains one of my all-time favourite musical theatre performances.
Caroline has played the role many times and remembers it fondly.
“It’s one of those gifts that you get every now and again,” she says. “It just felt like a comfy shoe.
“I’d listen to the script or the music and think, ‘I know exactly what to do here’.”
But perhaps the greatest lesson from Caroline’s career is not to wait for the perfect opportunity.
One of the most challenging roles of her career came when she received a message asking if she could travel to Paris almost immediately to play Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
She had never played the role and had just two weeks to learn it.
“I literally had to pack my bag that afternoon. I got on a plane [and] the next day off I went.”
She was doing three sessions a day, learning the role while the rest of the production had already been rehearsed.
Yet it is precisely these experiences that have shaped her. Her advice to young performers is refreshingly simple.
“Go for everything. Don’t decide something isn’t for you before you have even tried.”
It is advice she has clearly lived by. Caroline didn’t get her first leading lady role in the West End until she was 30.
It was as Mabel Normand in the tragic-comedy Mack and Mabel, for which Caroline received her first Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical.
More than three decades later, Caroline is still doing what she loves.
At the time of writing this, she is currently preparing to return to London to perform at the Garrick Theatre with lyricist Don Black, whose extraordinary body of work includes Sunset Boulevard and Tell Me on a Sunday.
As I chat with Caroline, what comes through most strongly is that, after all these years, she still approaches her work with the same curiosity she had at the beginning.
She still loves the costumes, makeup, lights, rehearsals and, most of all, the process of building a character.
“I sit down with my script and I write little notes of things and ideas I might have,” she says.
“Nothing ever seems dull to me.”
When the curtain drops, life away from the stage is considerably quieter these days.
After years of living and working in some of the world’s biggest cities, she has embraced the slower pace of life in Noosaville with her musician husband, Barrie Shaw.
“Some days I have to pinch myself that we actually live here. We just love it,” she says.
But the quieter pace of life on the Sunshine Coast hasn’t diminished her love of the stage. And somehow, that comes as no surprise.
After a lifetime of performing, travelling the world and bringing some of theatre’s most unforgettable women to life, Caroline still has the enthusiasm, curiosity and energy for the next challenge.
There are clearly more roles to play, more stories to tell and, hopefully, plenty more reasons for Caroline O’Connor to keep saying yes.