TINA ARENA
on stardom, love, and returning home
She’s the tiny Italian-Australian with the vocal cords of an orchestra and a fiery Latinate passion, so it feels entirely appropriate that Tina Arena would be cast as Eva Peron. Eva, the Argentinian pauper-turned-actressturned-First-Lady whose emotional speeches championing women’s suffrage had some of her people in raptures and showgirl pizazz had others baying for her blood, seems made for Tina.
Evita is probably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most powerful and demanding musical. The melodies lift and soar with a vocal range few can master. Madonna famously tried in the 1996 film version but her voice wasn’t up to it. Tina Arena, however, is a different proposition. “Andrew is punishing as a writer, absolutely, for a vocalist, without doubt, and I say that with the greatest compliment. These songs are gruelling,” she explains.
Over the years Tina says she’s been approached often about the role. “I don’t think I was ready in my 30s to play Eva Peron at all. I just didn’t feel ready emotionally,” she says. “Playing the role of Eva Peron now, at 50, is much more suited to the life experience that I’ve had.”
Tina is back home in Melbourne and when we meet she’s surrounded by what she claims to be organised chaos at the tail end of renovations on the newly purchased house she and her partner, French artist Vincent Mancini, and their 12-year-old son Gabriel are settling into. It looks pretty sorted to me, but Tina’s neatness standards, I suspect, are more exacting.
The family has been dividing its time between France and Australia, “going backwards and forwards for about five or six years. Gabriel was born in Paris but schooled between France and Melbourne, up until grade five. Grade six, which was last year, he stayed in school the entire year here in Melbourne.”
Tina and Vincent want Gabriel to go through high school in Melbourne. This was always the long-term plan, she says. But she also wanted to be back with her mum and dad. “They are probably the main reason,” she admits. Tina and her two sisters, Nancy, who works for Qantas, and Silvana, a stay-at-home mum who lives in London, were raised by
Sicilian immigrants Guiseppe (“Pepe”) and Franca Arena in a house full of music and unconditional love. They are Tina’s role models.
“My dad is a very generous, hard-working, brutally honest man who’d do anything for his family. Just one of the most decent human beings I know. He’s helped so many people. My mum’s strong, loving, empathetic, wise. They love one another. They’re obsessed with one another.”
Migrant childhood
When Tina talks about her childhood it’s with a sense of nostalgic delight and her eyes well up involuntarily.
“I loved the simplicity of my childhood,” she says. “I loved the simplicity of having a vege garden and riding my bike in the court where I grew up. There was a really beautiful neighbourhood of children. I grew up in [Melbourne suburb] Keilor East in a lovely court with beautiful families. There were Maltese, Greek, Slavic, there were Italians, there were Anglos, and everybody lived really well. We were always outside.”
But it wasn’t entirely without conflict. Migrants faced ugly prejudice and racism, and Guiseppe and Franca didn’t always feel welcome. “We’ve spoken a little bit about this now because they are in their 80s, so there is a lot of storytelling going on at the moment,” says Tina. “They struggled at first, of course they did. I think the early days were very difficult but I think it is the same for any immigrant and I feel we really need an extraordinary amount of education in that. We need to get back to basics as people of all colours and creeds, to get back to understanding and making these people feel welcome and learning about one another. We’re stronger when we come together.
“My father told me about one particular incident in a pub in Melbourne. There were a whole bunch of Europeans there, just having a very quiet drink, and somebody who was pretty raucous after a few drinks started picking on my dad.
Dad is a really gentle man, an elegant man and wouldn’t harm a fly, but this particular character kept going at him and it broke out into a fight. My father was obviously not going to sit there and take that. He let him have it three or four times and then went, well, here you go [Tina breaks into an air punch].
“He actually said to me something very interesting, that the police ended up charging the guy who was being racially discriminatory towards my dad. I think that gave him a sense of
‘it is okay here, there’s a rationale, the authorities are with us’.”
Tina spoke Italian at home and learned English at school. Today she still speaks to her parents in Italian and her husband and son in a mix of French and English. “I have an aptitude for languages. I also understand a bit of Spanish. My son speaks Spanish quite well, so he has French, Italian, English and Spanish, and he’s really good at Chinese. I think he’s got the linguistic gene.”
The other language she learned was music and she was immediately drawn to powerful female vocalists. “I was born at the end of 1967, so I grew up with Piaf, Streisand, all these adult and beautiful, classy women. There was a certain elegance about them.”
Tiny Tina
Her first public performance was at her cousin’s wedding. “I was probably about five or six. I was a flower girl and I remember it was at the Springvale town hall. I bugged my dad all night to sing and he finally talked the MC into it. I remember sobbing after that performance because I couldn’t understand the
“I loved the simplicity of my childhood.”
reaction. I was so young. All the public were standing. There was an ovation, they were squealing their heads off and I got frightened. So I ran off stage to my cousin, who picked me up, put me in his arms and consoled me and said it’s going to be fine.
“That’s when the MC said to Dad, ‘I think you’d better take your daughter here – she’s got something.’ He handed my father a business card and said, ‘Go and see this singing teacher.’ Within a couple of months of doing half-hour lessons once a week I was auditioning for [Australian TV show] Young Talent Time.”
“Tiny Tina”, as she was known, was an instant hit and when you look back at those early performances it’s easy to see why. Tina’s voice sounded European and different somehow. It had a sophistication and maturity way beyond her years and at 10 years old she released her first album.
I ask Tina what her friends and family thought when they saw the little girl they knew up there on television. “They thought that I was kooky,” she laughs. “But it was just normal to them, they knew I liked to sing.” Tina stayed on screen for six years, co-starring with a young Dannii Minogue among others.
Did her child star career affect her education? “Yes, I think if I hadn’t had the television distraction I probably may have gone on to uni. Obviously my studying time was limited, but I passed my year, I don’t know how, but I did. I liked school a lot,” she muses.
At 16, Tina left Young Talent Time, the longest running star of the show, and did a strange thing. She got a job as an insurance clerk. “For three months, yes,” she chuckles. “Basically I grew up with people saying to me, ‘You’re an entertainer, you don’t know what it’s like to work.’ So I wanted to prove something.”
I suspect Tina also wanted to try something new to reassure herself that performing was the right path for her. “But I think I knew I wasn’t seduced by fantasy,” she says. Tina went back to recording and started turning out pop songs. The going was pretty tough, and a big step up from Young Talent Time. Looking back, it wasn’t until Tina started writing her own songs that she hit her stride.
“I’m very expressive, and growing up in the 70s and the 80s, when I really knew what I wanted and felt, talking or singing about those feelings wasn’t necessarily always welcomed. Writing, for me, was a form of therapy,” she explains. “I’m known as somebody who doesn’t hold back. If I’ve got something to say, I’ll say it. Maybe that’s an endearing quality; maybe that’s a ball-breaking quality. I don’t know. But I really started to write because I was quite stressed. It was like opening Pandora’s box for me.”
Looks like she made it!
That Pandora’s box was quite a treasure trove, letting Chains,
Sorrento Moon, Burn and more hits into the world. Tina was a grown-up star and terrified. “It was frightening,” she says. “When you come from years of struggling and all of a sudden you’re catapulted and you don’t know where you’re going to land, and if you’re going to land and be busted up or whether you’ll land on your feet; you don’t have any time to be prepared.”
She moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s “to learn the craft of songwriting” and while she grew professionally, she admits it wasn’t easy personally. “It was a very lonely time. A very vulnerable time.”
In 1995 she married her manager, Ralph Carr, but she was never sure about the union, even having jitters on her wedding day, and an acrimonious divorce came four years later.
Around the same time, Tina became an almost accidental star in France and her life took a thrilling turn.
“I’d recorded the theme to The Mask of Zorro film and it kind of blew up in Europe. France took a particular liking to the song so I went over and started performing.”
Tina has become something of a superstar in France, recording and singing and then… falling in love.
She met French artist Vincent Mancini when she was appearing in a musical in London 18 years ago and they clicked immediately.
“He didn’t speak a word of English,” says Tina, who is now fluent in French. They lived together in Paris, where their romance flourished.
Romance in Paris
“He’s hugely intellectual,” she says of Vincent. “I’ve learned so much from him. He’s a bookworm and he’s always been in the arts, both his parents were 60s revolutionists. His mum’s a schoolteacher and he grew up in a household where political issues are very much a part of table conversation. I loved that. I also loved that he didn’t know anything about me. It was refreshing. I felt sorry for him, though, when he found out more about it. Poor bastard!
“We just have a great time together. He’s probably, next to my dad, the most honest man I know. Literally would take the shirt off his back to help somebody else. So I live with a man of exquisite integrity.”
After a few years together, son Gabriel came along and their life together grew a new dimension. “Motherhood changes everything. It’s the hardest gig in the world. We were planning to have children, it was on the list, it happened a little earlier. But we were over the moon. He’s the light of our lives.”
Vincent, says Tina, is a hands-on dad. “We both made a pact when he arrived that we would never leave him, and we haven’t. We’ve tag-teamed a lot. Vincent educates him really beautifully. He disciplines him a lot, but he disciplines him with a lot of love, too. There’s a real honesty to the bond they have. They’re very affectionate towards one another. None of that ‘oh mate, don’t touch me’. We are Latin and we’re a very tactile family.”
Did she and Vincent consider marrying when Gabriel was born? “I’ve been there and done that once. I don’t have a particularly fond memory of getting married,” Tina says. “I kind of am married, I feel I have been married for 18 years.”
As we talk more, I realise it was the bitter divorce, the legal and financial wrangling, that has put Tina off what she otherwise believes to be a “beautiful institution”. And when
I ask if she thinks she’ll ever marry, her answer is surprising. “I think we will do it and when we do, nobody will know about it. We’re very private about things like that.”
The next couple of months, however, are all about Evita. It’s a very big role and Tina says she needs to get her head in the right place. She’s been researching Eva Peron.
“What I admire about her is that she had a vision and she just went for it. She left an incredible legacy in social welfare and what she did for women. What she stood up for, I think, is what ultimately killed her during a time when she had no support. The females she was surrounded by totally ignored her because they thought she was a whore, because of the way she got there, to be wife of the president.”
50 and fabulous
With the #MeToo movement still swirling around the world, the timing for an Evita revival is certainly on the money. Over the past 40 years,
Tina has also faced the perils of being a woman in the entertainment industry. “I’ve been privy to some pretty disgraceful behaviour that still exists, and to this day I scratch my head, going, ‘How have we not evolved?’”
Tina recalls meeting Harvey Weinstein through her close girlfriend Bruna Papandrea, who produced Big Little Lies with Reese Witherspoon. “I met him at her birthday years ago. I knew straight away what he was.
I’ve met a few of those characters in my life and they have a particular air about them. [Harvey] is a man who’s got serious issues, obviously serious mental issues, and a huge imbalance, and it’s all about power again.”
For Tina – like most women – it took a long time to feel confident about who she was, and while facing the age of 50 last year, she says, wasn’t a big deal, it is a landmark feeling. “It’s a bigger deal for everybody else and for our culture.
It’s just a number. But I honestly think I’m better in my skin at 50 than I’ve ever been. I know who I am. I know my strengths, I know my weaknesses better than anybody.”
Evita is playing in Sydney from September 13 and Melbourne from December 5. For details and to book tickets, go to evitathemusical.com.au.