“I'm better in my skin at 50”​​​​​​​

 

- Juliet Rieden

She’s the tiny Italian-Australian with the vocal cords of an orchestra and a fiery Latinate passion, so it feels entirely appropriate that Tina Arena would be cast as Eva Peron. Eva, the Argentinian pauper-turned-actress-turned-FirstLady whose emotional speeches championing women’s suffrage had some of her people in raptures and showgirl pizazz had others baying for her blood, seems made for Tina.

Evita is probably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most powerful and demanding musical. The melodies lift and soar with a vocal range few can master. Madonna famously tried in the 1996 film version but her voice wasn’t up to it. Tina Arena, however, is a different proposition. “Andrew is punishing as a writer, absolutely, for a vocalist, without doubt, and I say that with the greatest of compliment. These songs are gruelling,” she explains.

Over the years Tina says she’s been approached often. “I don’t think I was ready in my 30s to play Eva Peron at all. I just didn’t feel ready emotionally,” she says. “Playing the role of Eva Peron now, at 50, is much more suited to the life experience that I’ve had.”

Tina is back in Melbourne and when we meet she’s surrounded by what she claims to be organised chaos at the tail end of renovations on the newly purchased house she and her partner, French artist Vincent Mancini, and their 12-year-old son Gabriel are settling into. It looks pretty sorted to me, but Tina’s neatness standards, I suspect, are more exacting.

The family has been dividing its time between France and Australia, “going backwards and forwards for about five or six years. Gabriel was born in Paris but schooled between France and Melbourne, up until grade five. Grade six, which was last year, he stayed in school the entire year here in Melbourne.”