Yolande: I'm nostalgic for my homeland

Yolande, 75, also starred in several Hollywood movies, including “The 13th Warrior” (1999), “The Brave One” (2007) and “The Accidental Husband” (2008).

But, unlike on Broadway, she wasn’t the first Sri Lankan in Hollywood because that distinction went to Maureen Hingert, 80, who was elected Miss Ceylon in 1955 and was one of the runners up in the 1955 Miss Universe contest in Long Beach, California.

Maureen, who hailed from St Lawrence Road Bambalapitya, appeared in several movies, including “The King and I”, “Fort Bowie”, “Gun Fever”, “Pillars of the Sky”, “Dangerous Search” and “Gunman from Laredo”. She also took the stage name Jana Devi.

Maureen and Yolande had one thing in common: they both attended Holy Family Convent in Bambalapitya, with Yolande also having later attended Good Shepherd Convent in Kotahena and St Paul’s Milagiriya.

The recent workshop presentation was probably a curtain- raiser to a future fullfledged production of Yolande’s life story—perhaps on or off-Broadway.

Deepa Purohit, who wrote the script for “Have Sari. Will Travel!” which was produced by Rising Circle, told the Sunday Times a proposed production is a work in progress: “I am still writing to prepare it for a possible production ideally down the line in the next year or so.”

She said Yolande’s story is really interesting and “the reason I’m drawn to it is because, number one, when she was doing readings and things for me, she was in her 70s playing all the mom roles in my plays. She started to tell me about her life and I was like, who’s going to tell her story?”

“She’s been around some really famous people – she was a protege of Billie Holiday’s, she knew Sarah Vaughan and Joe Williams, these big people – and in the jazz circles some people know her name but beyond that not really, and in the Sri Lankan world, definitely, she’s gone back and given concerts and things and I thought, I’m going to tell her story. But it’s not going to be a bio-play, it’s gonna be something cooler.”

Deepa said all these women who were in school with Yolande were getting married, cooking curries and having kids, and that wasn’t her. “So there’s a real trailblazer aspect to her and her story and I stand on her shoulders. So many of us do. And there are lots of people like her but this story is unheard,” she added.

As she went down memory lane, Yolande said the first highlight in her career was winning the Royal Academy of Music examinations when she was 4 and until 9 when her parents divorced, thereby putting an end to her ambition to be a concert pianist, like her mother who had been her teacher from the time she was 3 years old.

“I realise how blessed I was lying in my mum’s womb being awash with Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann,” said Yolande, whose maiden name is Wolff and took on the stage name of Bavan when she was in London.

Winning the Amateur Hour programme (at the then Radio Ceylon), produced by two Australians, Clifford Dodd and Graham Evans, she entered as a singer not as a pianist-- and won—resulting in Graham Evans giving Yolande her own Radio Show at age 15, called “Swingtime”

Graham Evans then sponsored her trip to Australia where “I did not know a soul until Peter Wille introduced me to Australia’s leading jazz musician Graeme Bell who decided to manage me--and that was at age 16 when my real singing career began.”

“Going to England, meeting jazz luminaries, singing at age 21, I was cast as the lead in a BBC TV play for which I got really good reviews, and then my acting career took off doing theatre and TV with Waris Hussein casting me as Cleopatra in Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” at the Duchess Theatre in the West End, and playing Hippolyta in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Royal Court, with a star studded cast, and directed by Tony Richardson.”

Since her days with the jazz trio, “everything has changed, and change is the only sure thing in Life. Music has changed and continues to change but I can’t think of it in terms of regression. It will always return to its roots and gather more information which then propels it forward with the times, and the expansion of each musician’s personal experiences and awareness, but the blues will always be.”

She said she has lived in New York for 54 years—“and almost every day I am nostalgic for my homeland. I feel privileged to have been born there, and wish that I could return every year for three weeks. However, I would have no place to stay. My sisters live in England; one of them has a flat in Colombo and they go around Christmas and return early April to avoid the English winter. I really yearn to be able to do that.”