Disney role was dream come true (From The Northern Echo)

Disney role was dream come true

12:45pm Thursday 4th February 2010

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It took three auditions for 37-year-old Anika Noni Rose to land the role of a Disney princess. Steve Pratt reports.

THE first time she saw herself on screen as a Disney princess, Anika Noni Rose was “a sobbing mess”. It was a dream come true for her, something she’d thought about since seeing her first animated film from the House of Mouse.

In The Princess And The Frog, which marks the studio’s return to hand drawn animation, she voices the leading character of Tiana – a strong-willed African- American woman who dreams of opening her own restaurant in New Orleans.

The makers were still working on the movie when Rose, recognisable to BBC viewers as Grace Makutsi in The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, came face-to-face with Tiana.

“I was at a toy fair in New York and sang one of the songs from the movie to introduce it,” she recalls. “We did a rehearsal and the guys were like, ‘that’s okay, let’s do a walk-through of how it’s going to be’. So I sang, turned around and they played the trailer for me. It was the first time I had seen that and I was a sobbing mess on that stage. I was so blown away. I still am.

“I didn’t know she was going to look like me. They had so many images of what she could have looked like. It was extraordinarily pleasant and thrilling.”

While most of us began our Disney education with Bambi or Snow White, Rose’s introduction was Fantasia in which animation were put to classical music.

“The wonderful thing about Fantasia is there’s a storyline, Mickey Mouse is being naughty and he gets caught.

It’s the way children think, the way they dream. There are so many things happening but not in that MTV quick cut flash way. I’ve owned it since I was a teenager, I bought it.

And I always wanted to be part of this particular world and here I am. Amazing.”

On the big screen, she’s probably best known from the film of the stage musical Dreamgirls but her awardwinning career includes not just musicals but drama (she starred as Maggie in a Broadway revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof) and TV (The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency).

Try to typecast her at your peril.

“Thank goodness,” she says when I suggest it’s impossible to pin her down. “I try to keep it that way. I trained classically in drama and that’s what I had planned to do. I started off as a legit actor and then I moved into musicals because I love to sing and it was offered and I wanted to do that. My first play on Broadway was a musical, Footloose.”

With The Ladies No 1 Detective Agency, she was aware of the books before auditioning as she’d read three of them. Having never been to Africa, she read up on Botswana before filming began there.

“I wanted to know the culture because I didn’t want to go there and be a dummy, because that’s just rude. but also it informs what you do.

You want to know little cultural things about a character. It’s not necessarily something that’s written in the script,” says Rose.

She’s had no word if the BBC will film any more of the series. But she doesn’t seem short of work although she’s not at a point where the offers are pouring in.

“But I’m building a career and hope I’m building a reputation of not just good work but somebody who’s good to work with because I love so much of what I do. I try to choose something different every time from the last thing I did.”

She’d love to do more soundtrack work for Disney, by lending her voice to other projects. “I’d like to do something out of the box that stretches me to take my sound in a completely different direction,” she says.

Doing Cat On A Hot Tin Roof on Broadway, with James Earl Jones as Big Daddy was an amazing experience, not least because she’d been wanting to do something classical for some time.

“That was the first time that I was an adult on stage and it was a magnificent experience. To see someone like Mr Jones, who has been doing this for 50 years and still comes to work every day looking for something new in what he’s doing. That’s such a beautiful thing to see and be a part of.

“When you don’t find joy in it any more it’s time to move on and try something else. I want to be challenged. I don’t want to get bored. I want someone to say she doesn’t really look like that part but I bet she can do it, let’s try her.

And I will try my best.”

■ The Princess And The Frog (U) opens in cinemas

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