It’s a fine life, Jodie

Unusually for a stage actress, Jodie Prenger can catapult herself out of bed bright and early despite all the late nights that the theatre demands.

The first to arrive at the YOU photo shoot at a West London studio, she is fizzing with excitement like an uncorked champagne bottle when she opens the door to me.

No wonder she’s feeling emotional, for Jodie is the girl who became the people’s choice in the BBC1 talent show I’d Do Anything earlier this year when she won the role of Nancy in Cameron Mackintosh’s West End revival of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! When the show opens next month, she’ll star alongside Rowan Atkinson, who’s playing Fagin.

And this former cruise-ship singer, who first learned her craft in amateur dramatics and the ultra-tough
school of working men’s clubs, is no celebrity wannabe in love with the limelight rather than the reality, but a hard grafter who has finally achieved her dream of performing in the West End after years of attending cattle-call auditions.

In other words, her win really means something to her. As she puts it: ‘You don’t go out there searching for fame, you go out there to do something you love doing.’

At the end of May, Jodie, 29, became the third BBC talent-contest winner to land a starring role in a West End show, following Lee Mead’s triumph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (after winning Any Dream Will Do in 2007) and Connie Fisher in The Sound of Music (after winning How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in 2006).
Jodie fought off her closest rival, 18-year-old Jessie Buckley, by wrapping her husky vocals around such showstoppers as Nancy’s aria ‘As Long As He Needs Me’, prowling the studio stage like one born in the theatre, rather than in Blackpool to parents with no history of show business.

Yet with two of the panel’s heavyweight judges, West End impresarios Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, both rooting for Jessie in the show’s final, the older girl’s prospects wobbled until the viewers swung it for her and Lord Lloyd Webber magnanimously conceded that Jodie was ‘the people’s Nancy’.

There are no hard feelings, as Cameron has now become Jodie’s biggest mentor and champion. As she says with a generous smile and a philosophical shrug, ‘He had to vote for one of the two of us in the final, after all.’

Since Jodie had had no drama-school training before turning to the stage professionally eight years ago, Cameron sent his latest leading lady on a four-week Shakespeare course at Rada over the summer. He then cast her as one of the ensemble in Les Misérables for three weeks to give her some West End experience before she began rehearsals for Oliver!, which will be staged at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

He has also given her Wednesday and Thursday evenings off to protect her voice from the strain that
affected Connie Fisher, which means Jodie will give six rather than eight performances a week during her six-month contract. And, she claims, she has not once encountered the kind of theatrical snobbishness you might expect towards a reality TV star.

‘The cast of Les Mis have been rooting for me; they’re like an extra family,’ says Jodie, who is currently single and renting a flat near Rada in London’s Bloomsbury. ‘I had my own line to sing in the show and I was climbing the barricade on the set like you wouldn’t believe – that’s at least 400 calories burnt a night. There should be a Les Mis work-out video,’ she laughs.

Jodie’s life has been transformed in more ways than one over the past few years since winning a long battle with her weight, which tipped 22 stone at one point. She felt that there was only one kind of popular singer for someone her size to be, so she went into comedic singing and sent herself up by performing the splits on stage as a warm-up for comedians such as Joe Pasquale and Ken Dodd.

She has had the last laugh now, of course. And her luck finally began to turn two years ago, when she won her first reality show, Living TV’s diet contest The Biggest Loser, by shedding eight stone.

As she explains, ‘I was 18 stone and a size 26 when I did The Biggest Loser. I ate the wrong things and I wasn’t doing any exercise, so I had to lose weight for health reasons as it was affecting my joints. A male contestant said to me, “A woman will never win it,” and it’s true that men usually lose weight quicker because of their metabolism.

'But a remark like that just gave me that fire in the belly to succeed against all odds. So I was the first female winner, and I did it for the girls,’ exults Jodie. ‘I love going to the gym now – I adore my kettlebell [cast-iron weight]. And I could never have done I’d Do Anything if I hadn’t gone through that weight loss. I can’t tell you how many West End auditions I had gone for and never got.’
The weight loss meant that the bottom fell out of her comedic singing career, as it were, and she was no longer the butt of comedians’ jokes as the singing fat lady. Now the biggest loser has become the biggest winner; not only does Jodie glow with new-found health and energy, but her striking dark colouring and strong bone structure show a remarkable resemblance to the very first Nancy – that magnetic musical star Georgia Brown, who played her in the original 1960 West End production of Oliver! Clearly it was a case of destiny that Jodie should inherit the role created by Georgia, who died in 1992.

‘I’m a size 14; I’m just a normal woman,’ says Jodie, who stands at five foot three without the sexy three-inch high heels she’s wearing when I meet her. ‘I admit that I’ll never be a size zero. But I think women are
beautiful creatures, and if they are happy and healthy they can’t go wrong in life,’ she says, adding that she also became an online agony aunt after The Biggest Loser, when overweight people from all over the world e-mailed her for advice.

Always a positive person with an outgoing personality, as a ‘large’ child Jodie tried to make light of her weight by becoming the class clown. ‘All the girls had boyfriends before me at school, but I was verging on being a tomboy with my short hair shaved at the back and permed on top, and Deirdre Barlow glasses,’ she says, mocking the memory of her old ugly-duckling self.

‘I was sometimes teased at school, but I would laugh it off. Two girls once wore one of my skirts after a
PE class. They thought I would be fine with it as I was always the joker, but that was just my way of dealing with it. As a lot of people with weight problems will know, you laugh it off at the time but it’s upsetting when you get home.’

Jodie was also relieved to find that there was no truth behind judge Andrew Lloyd Webber’s controversial remark, towards the end of I’d Do Anything, that his fellow judge Cameron thought she was ‘too big for the role of Nancy’.

‘Andrew got hold of the wrong end of the stick and it got blown out of proportion,’ explains Jodie. ‘Cameron himself told me that he never actually said that. And if you go back to the novel, Dickens describes Nancy as “quite stout and healthy”.’

Liza Minnelli, no stranger to weight and other struggles herself, also became a mentor to Jodie when she gave a singing masterclass on I’d Do Anything. ‘Apparently I was Liza’s favourite. Isn’t it just great to have that endorsement? And I was so nervous about meeting Rowan Atkinson recently, as I think he’s phenomenal, but he’s a true gent. Can life get any better?’ she enthuses.

For like Liza, Jodie can’t help wearing her heart on her sleeve, and there’s a lovable quality about her
that’s appropriate for the role of the ‘tart-with-a-heart’ who mothers all the boys, and Oliver in particular, in Fagin’s den.

The notoriously masochistic lyrics of Nancy’s yearning song ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ express her loyalty to her violent lover, the villainous Bill Sykes, and Jodie feels a fierce loyalty to Nancy despite her terrible taste in men.

‘For me, Nancy is one of the most beautiful characters in musical theatre, who deserves a lot of respect,’ she says. ‘This man is beating her down within an inch of her life and she’s still got that heart of gold, still carries that torch for the man she loves.’
Jodie herself has never been physically abused, but she encountered the dark side of fame in June when she was the victim of a tawdry kiss-and-tell story by her former fiancé, the aptly named Steve Greengrass, 41, whom she had met through an online dating agency.

He whinged in print about feeling ‘used’ by Jodie after their romance fizzled out during the filming of I’d Do Anything, also alleging that she had kissed another man on a night out. Speaking for the first time about
this very public betrayal, Jodie says: ‘It was really tough when he did that, but in fact Steve told three
different stories.

'Everyone has had a relationship that’s not ended up the way you thought it would. I got engaged to him during the run of the show, but it wasn’t me who did the proposing as he said. I have given him back his Tiffany ring – if it was a Tiffany ring,’ she adds sceptically.

‘It was a situation where two people just didn’t know each other. The story he told about a hen night was misrepresented: I didn’t kiss the other guy. I just want to keep my dignity. I’ve talked to friends and family about it and I’ve got to focus on the positive things and look forward.’

Jodie’s family is a great source of strength. She owes her unusual surname – pronounced Prenjer – to her Dutch father Marty, who runs an old people’s home in Blackpool with her mother Madeleine. Her parents always supported her ambitions, once giving her £500 for a taxi from Blackpool to London for an audition because Madeleine was worried about Jodie’s safety on the train.

And Jodie, who trained as a nail technician to have something to fall back on, still likes to lead the residents at the home in Vera Lynn sing-songs and does their nails. She has a 21-year-old brother, Marco, who has just completed a fine arts degree, and she can’t wait to go back on her days off to see them all.

Right now Jodie is enjoying single life again. ‘I have not been chatted up in the longest time now – maybe I scare men off! But I’m not lonely, I’m too busy.

'Cameron is the only man in my life, and I think he’s a safe bet,’ she says of the confirmed bachelor. ‘But if the film star Gerard Butler was free! Only joking, I would be too shy to approach him,’ she adds, laughing at herself again.

She’s in no hurry for another romance, since she believes that everything happens at the right time in life. ‘When I did The Biggest Loser, I was ready to lose weight. And when I did I’d Do Anything, I was ready to play Nancy. So now I’m out there to prove myself against all the odds. ’