‘Lockdown has helped me to clarify what’s important’
Having turned 40, Katherine Jenkins tells Mark Bailey how she’s now trying to build a healthier lifestyle for her whole family
Fortieth birthdays can be daunting affairs but Katherine Jenkins passed the milestone two weeks ago without a midlife meltdown. “Yeah, I feel OK,” purrs the glamorous mezzosoprano, her Welsh accent undimmed by years of singing for royalty, popes and presidents.
“I can’t quite believe I’m now going to say: I’m 40. It is that thing, isn’t it? But I think what has happened in the last few months has – for me anyway, and I think for a lot of other people – been really good at clarifying what is important.”
She was planning to go on holiday but settled for a glass of champagne and a vegan birthday cake at home in London with her husband Andrew Levitas – the American filmmaker – and their children Aaliyah, four, and Xander, two.
“What more do I really want?” she asks. “If I could go back in time and say to the teenage me, ‘Katherine, where do you think you might be at 40?’ it definitely wouldn’t be here. I’m besotted with my family. I love that I get to sing as my job. So I feel like trying to do a bucket list for the next year… it just feels greedy.”
Like many working parents, Jenkins used lockdown as a chance to build a healthier family lifestyle, with lots of walks and garden games. “My kids have been looking for bugs and picking up sticks so it has felt like a bit of an old-fashioned childhood,” she says. As Jenkins and her husband travel extensively, she feels thankful for this “gift of time when our kids are really young”.
The working-class girl from Neath, South Wales, has become the world’s most successful classical singer, with 13 No1 albums. But she insists her success is built upon good health.
“As a singer, your body is your instrument,” she says. “So you have to look after yourself, be in the best physical shape and have your immune system working at an optimum level. A cough or a cold might mean I have to cancel a concert.”
To stay healthy she buys organic veg, tries to “eat the colours of the rainbow”, and performs bodyweight exercises in the garden. She is a keen runner and finished the London Marathon in 2013. “As I get older, I feel that the impact is quite wearing, so I’ve transitioned more into yoga,” she reveals. “The people I admire in their 70s still do yoga. I think that’s because it’s about being limber and supple, which is the key to staying young.”
Jenkins’s interest in nutrition was sparked by her close friend Polly Noble, a health coach, who died from cervical cancer aged just 32.
“I became a vegetarian because of Polly,” she says. “She went on a raw diet and I did it with her for solidarity. And I never went back to eating meat. I’ve now become vegan. Just because I found that the mercury levels in the fish I was eating were quite high. And I became allergic to dairy. My nutritional intake is not about making me look good. It has always been more a focus on what’s good for my body.”
Her children still eat meat but she
‘I feel like trying to do a bucket list for the next year… it just feels greedy’
tries to find “crossover” meals – like jackfruit fajitas – which they can eat together. “Andrew is a big meat eater. I am not. So we decided we’ll give them meat until they were able to say they didn’t want it. It can be their decision.” She encourages her children to snack on raw fruit and vegetables. “My parents never gave me things like fast food so I never craved that stuff,” she explains.
Jenkins dabbled with diets in her early 20s but those anxious days are gone. “I’ve got a big appetite,” she giggles. “So I have big portions of three meals a day but I won’t snack in between.”
On a typical day, she has porridge with honey and blueberries for breakfast, a salad with tofu and beans for lunch, and mushrooms with edamame pasta for dinner. “My mum (Susan) made a lot of our meals from scratch and I think where possible that is the key. I appreciate that people are in a rush. We are, too… but it’s nice to do home cooking. That’s definitely something I remember my father (Selwyn) doing for us after school.”
The singer’s coronavirus-delayed album Cinema Paradiso – a tribute to her favourite film songs, including Moon River and Singin’ in the Rain
– was released last week. She hopes it will have extra resonance after the surge of nostalgia during lockdown.
“We’ve all been into movies for escapism, comfort and entertainment and this album is really an extension of that,” she says. “It’s all the wonderful musical moments of the films we’ve probably been watching. We’ve been reminiscing over our favourites like Amadeus and Forrest Gump and showing the children the movies we loved like Pinocchio and Splash.”
Jenkins learnt about mental health at an early age, having lost her father to cancer when she was just 15. “I kept my head down, got through my exams and didn’t properly deal with it and as a result I started to have nightmares,” she recalls. “Somebody recommended I speak to a child grief counsellor. And I am so, so thankful for that advice because it made the world of difference to talk to somebody outside of my mother and sister. I didn’t want to keep bringing it up because I didn’t want to upset them further.”
Mindful that many people are feeling lost and alone right now, she has been performing Saturday concerts on Facebook Live to raise morale. “I kept thinking about people like my mum who are on their own and potentially scared and lonely,” she says. “My husband is my sound man. Aaliyah is dancing in the background. She is my rent-a-crowd. And we all just try to keep people’s spirits up. It’s a nice excuse to get out of your pyjamas, put some make-up on and sing. Afterwards, my husband cooks me dinner and we treat it as a date night.”
In April, Jenkins and Dame Vera Lynn re-released their duet of We’ll Meet Again to raise funds for NHS workers. The death of the “Forces’ sweetheart” in June left her distraught. “She really inspired me and encouraged me to do my warzone concerts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo,” she says. “I just don’t think they make them like Dame Vera any more… I will miss her greatly and it’s a huge loss for us all.”
The Welsh singer commemorated the 75th anniversary of VE Day in May with a Youtube concert from the Royal Albert Hall. The empty seats left her fighting back tears. She also sang live from Buckingham Palace. “We had to park away from the palace and Andrew was carrying my train, like my bridesmaid, through the deserted streets,” she recalls. “It was like a zombie apocalypse, like a scene out of a movie… I remember it taking my breath away.”
Jenkins has made her own movie debut in her husband’s forthcoming film Minamata, about the chilling effects of mercury poisoning in Fifties Japan, which features Hollywood titans Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy. “They were very gracious and encouraging. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. And it was amazing to see my husband in action. But of course, it came with a caveat: these are the only days when you’re allowed to boss me around.”
‘It’s a nice excuse to get out of your pyjamas, put some make-up on and sing’
Katherine Jenkins’s new album Cinema Paradiso is out now