The things we can all learn from Cinderella...
“Cinderella is the best panto roles definitely,” Michelle says. “I feel like I've spent my whole life praying to be Cinderella one day. I think for me and especially growing up as a girl and watching Cinderella the Disney film, she is just so perfect and she gets the happy ending. She goes on the journey and she gets the whole transformation which is really important and personally I just feel that I can really relate to her.
"There are so many parallels to life when you watch Cinderella, the fact that life is not easy but the fact that when the chips are down she just keep going and keeps moving forward and things work out in the end. Cinderella is a fantastic example of that and when you think about the pandemic and how people have struggled, the fact that we have been surrounded by so many difficult and negative things for so long now, she is a wonderful example of what happens when you just keep positive.”
And that's absolutely the way you've got to play the role.
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Hide Ad“You have got to have good positive optimistic energy. She has a way of seeing the good in everyone even when there is no good there and that is something special.”
As for Gosport: “We moved from Plymouth when I was about two and I was in Gosport until I was 17. I went to Bay House School and I loved learning. I was always very happy to go to school and I was always keen to know what I was going to learn next. When you get to secondary school, you have this new timetable and all the subjects divided up and subjects that you've never done before and I just loved that. I was a bit of a geek. I went to London after that. I went to live with my dad and I went to college there and did A levels and then I was not sure what I was going to do. I was just doing normal jobs but then I went to drama school a few years later. I went to Mountview when I was 21, I think. It was great. It was so focused because people knew what they wanted to do. You are starting at eight in the morning and going on until six in the evening and there is no time for getting drunk or anything like that. It was very concentrated.”
Michelle did pantos as a child at the Ferneham Hall in Fareham from the age of eight to about 14 and she did a professional panto in Hunstanton when she was about 21, playing the genie of the lamp. But this is her first principal role: “I live in Whiteley now. I moved back. It was just so hard living in London and I've done that for a long time and I just needed a break. And I realised that you just don't have to be in London all the time. So I moved back and settled in Whitley and it's been great. A friend of mine saw the audition for this coming up and said that I'd be brilliant for it and so I rang my agent and they just said go for it and I did and I'm so pleased. This is the first theatre that I ever performed in as a five-year-old so it is lovely to be coming back.”