HRT: the ageing soprano’s secret weapon
Lesley Garrett, the self-styled ‘diva next door’, tells Peter Stanford about how she prevented the menopause from ruining her career
The ageing diva is a stock character in opera, the once-admired soprano who continues to sing the part of youthful heroines when in her fifties and even sixties to a dwindling audience of hardcore fans. Others choose to slip away into a quiet retirement to avoid the absurdity of it all. Neither hold much appeal for Lesley Garrett.
The 62-year-old self-styled “diva next door” is, she says, on a crusade. “We’ve got used to hearing older actresses complaining that there are no decent roles for them any more. Well, we are like that in opera, only we are way back in doing something about it. So I have started banging a big drum.”
And when it comes to getting her voice heard, Garrett, with her cross-over repertoire that stretches from Mozart to Meat Loaf via West End musicals, reaches places that other opera stars can only dream of. Her TV credits include Strictly Come Dancing, Loose Women, Who Do You Think You Are? and the new series of Masterchef. If there was a celebrity drum-banging show, you’d probably find her on it. She laughs at the idea, a warm, friendly, intimate chuckle. “I only do reality television if I am going to learn something,” she corrects me. “So I drew the line at the thing in the jungle.” Notwithstanding that refusal, she confesses that her biggest problem in life is saying no.
We are holed up in the cosy, cluttered, colourful sitting room of the north London Edwardian home she shares with Peter, her GP husband of 30 years, their two grown-up children, Jeremy and Chloe, their partners, and the two children of a dear friend of hers who died recently. There is an energy about the place, and it seems to radiate out of Garrett. There is, she admits, always something coming up that she has agreed to do: “My family is always saying: ‘You’re doing what?’”
This weekend, it’s the Dankworth Family Festival, an annual event set up by the late Sir John Dankworth and his wife, Dame Cleo Laine, the singer, in the grounds of their home. The event, which also features the Dankworths’ jazz singer daughter, Jacqui, novelist Ben Okri and the Brodsky Quartet, will raise money for the local Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre.
“Dame Cleo – who I’m so looking forward to meeting – has a son with MS,” Garrett explains, “and I had a very close school friend, Helen Fox, who developed it just after leaving school and who passed away, so she’ll be in my mind.” It came about because she and Jacqui Dankworth were singing on the same bill, became friends and agreed to support each other’s favourite causes. In exchange for singing Gershwin at Wavendon – “jazz is my final frontier” – cricket fan Garrett persuaded Dankworth to appear in September at a 30th anniversary concert she is organising as president of Lady Taverners, which encourages more girls into the sport.
“I think you’d call it a quid pro quo,” she concedes, pronouncing the Latin with the flat vowels of her native Yorkshire, where she grew up in the mining community of Thorne, near Doncaster. Her parents, Derek and Margaret, who died within nine months of each other in 2013, both worked on the railways but later, as mature students, trained as teachers, encouraging their daughter “always to explore all possibilities”.
It’s that down-to-earthness – combined with her refusal since she burst on to the scene as a lyric soprano with the English National Opera in the early Eighties to be restricted to the opera canon – that has made Garrett something of a national treasure. “You can call me that if you like,” she says. It is her campaign to shake up the way that opera treats what she prefers to refer to as “experienced women” that she is really itching to talk about. “When I began to do musicals in the late Nineties, there was a sense in the opera world that I’d given it up.” But for Garrett it wasn’t about turning her back on her roots, but rather embracing other opportunities.
“Embrace is a word I love. I took a scenic detour via the West End, recording and touring. And then someone said, ‘Do you want to do a TV pilot?’ and I naturally said yes.” There were also practical considerations: “I had two small children then. I had done everything I could at ENO, and I was beginning to get good roles abroad in Europe, but it was crazy. I didn’t want to be away from home. So I chose the work that allowed me to be a mum.”
That lasted for a decade, but three years ago, with her children off to university, she decided it was time for what she calls “my new opera career”. The doors were still open to her, but with very little on offer to tempt her once she was inside: “It was all bag ladies and witches.”
There are two main reasons for this gap, she believes, one political and one technical: “Traditionally in opera, after child-bearing, women are not seen as important. They have no power, so no one writes parts for them.” It makes her furious: “We live in a world where experienced women are running countries. So where are they in opera and, if they are not there, how can we claim to be a contemporary art form? Who is going to come to it if it is just a museum piece?” And then there is what happens to a diva’s range as they grow older. “We lose the tops of our voices when we hit the menopause,” says Garrett, bluntly.
So how has she avoided that fate? “Well, I have kept my technique in
‘HRT is the most wonderful drug – I’m never coming off it’
very good order because I have had singing lessons every week of my life for 40 years, but basically three letters – HRT. It is the saviour of the soprano. I want you to put it in black and white, HRT is the most wonderful drug. I’ve been taking it for 20 years because I had a very early menopause, six months after my daughter was born. I think she was probably my last egg. And I’m never going to come off it.”
Working with opera companies and a new generation of composers, Garrett is attempting to add a whole new dimension to opera that is rooted in the 21st century. “There are fabulously glamorous older women to be explored. Think of Jackie O or Angela Merkel. Well, perhaps not glamorous in her case, but powerful. Or Christine Lagarde [head of the International Monetary Fund]? I can see myself in all those Chanel suits.”
That’s the concept, she says. So far, the reality has turned out rather differently but is, she insists, no less thrilling. Last year, there was a new piece at the Royal Opera House, Pleasure, in which she played Val, a lavatory attendant in a gay bar. “No Chanel suit,” she laments, “but a lovely tabard.”
What Garrett calls her “little hobby horse” to change opera’s treatment of older singers is picking up speed. She has three roles coming up: a return to the ENO this autumn in an adaptation of Hitchcock’s classic thriller, Marnie; playing a man in a Welsh National Opera production about suffragettes; and then back to ENO for Jack the Ripper. How does a soprano play a man, I can’t help wondering aloud. “Well, how does a man play the principal dame?” she shoots back. “Trouser roles”, as she refers to them, don’t daunt her. If anything, the forthcoming Masterchef is more of a challenge. “I don’t do dinner parties or posh cooking, but with a houseful right now, I wanted to improve on my home cooking.”
The filming has been completed but her lips are sealed: “All I can tell you is I made a new friend in one of the other contestants, Ulrika Jonsson. We’re going to start our own restaurant – her raw fish with my Yorkshire puddings.” It sounds like, this once, she really ought to say no.