Susan Boyle tells John Preston why she wanted actress Elaine C Smith to portray her in a musical about her lifestory and unlikely rise to fame.
8:00AM GMT 14 Mar 2012
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Two women are sitting on a sofa in a Glasgow hotel room. They are roughly the same age — in their early fifties – the same height and the same build.
Even their hair is the same length. One of them, the singer Susan Boyle, sits very upright with her hands on her lap and her fingers leafed together. The other woman, the actress, Elaine C Smith, has one leg crossed over the other and an arm flung back over the sofa.
Smith is about to play Susan Boyle in I Dreamed a Dream, a musical based on Boyle’s life. But — and this is where it gets complicated — Boyle is also going to be appearing, as herself. Every night Boyle will walk on stage and sing the last two numbers. If all goes according to plan, the audience should be knee-deep in sodden tissues by the time the curtain falls.
Even so, it seems a very peculiar arrangement. But then nothing in Susan Boyle’s life has been simple. The youngest of nine children, she was starved of oxygen at birth and suffered learning difficulties as a child.
For the first 44 years of her life, she lived with her parents in a council house in Blackburn, West Lothian.
Bullied, ostracised and unlucky in love, her only job was a six-month stint working as a trainee cook. Life, it seemed, was ticking glumly by.
Then, in August 2008, Boyle auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent. As soon as they saw her, the audience began sniggering, gleefully expecting a vintage piece of car-crash television. Except that it didn’t quite work out that way. She left to a standing ovation and within six minutes the clip of her singing had gone round the world on YouTube.
At the time Elaine C Smith was appearing in Calendar Girls in the West End. “I was about to go on stage when Patricia Hodge and Lynda Bellingham both came out of their dressing rooms in tears. They said, 'Oh Elaine, you’ve got to see this woman sing.’ ”
As far as Smith was concerned, the sight — and sound — of Boyle singing was not only magical; it struck a deeper chord. “For me, Susan was the embodiment of the idea that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. And of course it’s a reminder that just occasionally dreams can come true.”
For Susan Boyle, the secret of her appeal lies in the fact that she’s the supreme underdog who made good. “I think what people responded to most of all was that I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Remember, I’d been to 12 auditions before and I’d been turned down every time.”
And what would have happened if you’d been turned down for a 13th time, I ask. Would you have just kept on coming back? She fixes me with a disconcertingly direct stare. “You bet.”
Elaine C Smith first thought of turning Susan Boyle’s lifestory into a musical in 2010. Best known as an actress and comedienne — she played Rab C Nesbitt’s wife on TV for nine years — she thought it had all the makings of a colossal crowd-pleaser.
“Susan had said once in an interview that if anyone was going to play her, she’d like it to be me. I was very flattered, but at the same time, I thought, it’ll never happen. There’ll be lawyers involved and Simon Cowell and God knows who else. And to get Susan herself to be in it just seemed too mad.” None the less, she approached Boyle’s manager, Andy Stephens. To her astonishment, Stephens liked the idea. Shortly after, Smith got the go-ahead, the two women met for the first time. “Susan invited me over for a cup of tea,” says Smith. “I was quite nervous, but we got on very well. She’s got a great sense of humour and a very raucous laugh.”
“A filthy laugh,” says Boyle.
“That’s right — a filthy laugh,” says Smith. “Then at the end she gave me a hug. I was very moved by that.”
At the heart of I Dreamed a Dream is Boyle’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent, with her struggles to get to Glasgow — she had to catch six buses and only just made it – providing Smith with a useful metaphor for the struggles she’s faced in life. “That seemed to sum up all the wrong turnings Susan had taken.”
Boyle remembers being very nervous when she started to sing at the audition — but also very determined. “I tried to hide behind this persona I’d created; it was like a more assured version of me.”
And when it was over, she went home, had a cup of tea and went to bed. “To be honest, I didn’t give it any thought at all.”
It wasn’t until 12 weeks later, on April 11 2009, that the audition was screened — at which point all hell broke loose. As Susan Boyle’s fame increased, so did the pressures. The day after being beaten into second place — by dance troupe Diversity — in the Britain’s Got Talent final she was admitted to the Priory suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Clearly she’s still sore about going to the Priory. “I just needed to go home and rest. That’s when I thought it was all over. I thought no one would take me seriously afterwards. They’d just assume I was crazy.”
What everyone wants to know about Susan Boyle is what’s she like. What they really mean by this, of course, is how weird is she? Nothing like as weird as she’s been painted is the answer. She’s a bit wary, a bit gruff and occasionally you get a glimpse of great emotional volatility just below the surface. But given everything that’s happened to her in the past three years, it would be odd if she wasn’t wary. As she admits, she’s still struggling to come to terms with how dramatically her life has changed.
“Because I’d risen so quickly, I was frightened I was going to sink quickly, too. At the same time, I felt I didn’t really deserve all the success I’d had. Although I still worry about that, I’m getting more relaxed now.”
Boyle still lives in the council house where she was brought up — although she’s bought a bigger house not far away, she has no plans to move into it. In Blackburn, people tend to leave her alone, she says. But what would happen if she were to step outside the hotel we’re in, on to the streets of Glasgow?
“If I stayed in one place for long enough, people would start to say, 'There’s Susan Boyle.’ It’s like Chinese whispers. And the next moment you’ve got people asking for autographs and taking photos.” Not that she’s complaining. Clearly she enjoys being famous, even if she finds it a strange and at times puzzling business. At the end of our interview, the PR woman shows Boyle some film she shot on her phone of her five-year-old niece dancing ecstatically to one of her recordings.
Boyle looks at it for a while, then shakes her head in disbelief. “My God,” she says, “Is that the effect I have on people?”
'I Dreamed a Dream’ previews at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle (08448 112121), from March 23
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