WHO IS ELAINE PAIGE?

First, on the entertainment front, the favorites did well at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last night.  

• You did not miss it, for to watch, you had to stream Netflix.  Here, view the results.  Yes, the whole thing, beginning with that Red Carpet walk.  Meaning, 8 hours and 21 minutes.  
• Not being on network television, a lot of F words, and some winners came up drunk.
• The favorites all won, especially Oppenheimer.
• Barbra Streisand won the Life Achievement award.  Just this, less than 10 minutes.

As I don't feel particularly spiritual today, will skip on to something I recently saw on Music Choice, Elaine Paige.  Was the original Grizabella who sang Memories from Cats.  It was 1981 in the West End.  In 1998 she played that role in the movie.  Mind you, Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave it an embarrassing 20% rating.  On the other hand, the audience bestowed 80%, and I follow them more than reviewers.  

There was a second Cats, in 2019.  Again, Rotten Tomatoes reviewers hated it, gave the film a 19 score.  Even the audience cringed, with a 53.  Anyone remember who played Bombalurina in that film?  Taylor Swift.  Steven Spielberg was Executive Producer.

All that brings me back to the first audition of Susan Boyle in Britain's Got Talent in 2009.  If you click on that video, she says her idol is Elaine Paige.  Well, Boyle did pretty well.  Here they sing together.

But, really, who is Elaine Paige?

• Was born in 1948 in England, grew to a height of 5 feet, and remains so at 75.
• Debut in the 1968 production of Hair in the West End.
• Was selected to play Eva Perón in the first production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. West End in 1978.  There is no existing video from that cast, but this is an audio of Don't Cry for Me Argentina.  Sings this song again much later in the 25th Anniversary of Royal Albert Hall.

• 
  Three years later, Paige, Grizabella, Memories and Cats.  She joined the cast because Judi Dench had to withdraw from a torn Achilles tendon.  Interestingly enough, Dench returned to appear in the 2019 Cats film, playing Deuteronomy.
• 1985, show Chess, with Barbara Dickson on I Know Him So Well.
• 1991, revival, West End, Anything Goes, which she also co-produced.  This Cole Porter musical first played on Broadway in 1934 with Ethel Merman.

• 
  In 1993 sang 15 songs in Piaf, some in French.
• From 2000 to 2001 starred as Anna Leonowen in the revival of The King and I at the London Palladium, strengthening her title as the First Lady of British Musical Theatre.
• No children, never married, but had an 11-year relationship with lyricist Tim Rice throughout the 1980's.  Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber put on Evita.
• Eight gold albums and four multi-platinums.

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