The year I nearly lost my voice - for good

Rising star: Andrew Lloyd Webber predicts Connie Fisher could have as big a career ahead of her as Elaine Paige

To be thrown in at the deep end was incredibly exciting," says Connie Fisher. "But if I'd got rubbish reviews I probably wouldn't be working now." Thirteen months on from her West End debut in The Sound of Music, Fisher has had an extraordinary year. She is loved by millions but she's had to overcome major obstacles - illness, loneliness and relationship trauma. And she's still only 24.

Eighteen months ago, she was a complete unknown from rural Wales. Now, having won the lead role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's £4 million musical, she is earning £10,000 a week. She has released an album and performed in front of Princes William and Harry at the Princess Diana memorial concert in July (at their request, she sang their mother's favourite song, Memory).

Lloyd Webber predicts Fisher could have as big a career ahead of her as Elaine Paige. But it was nearly over before it started. After opening night, Fisher did 98 performances on the trot.

She was signing autographs for 400 people out in the cold and recording her album. Her voice seized up.

"It all went a bit pear-shaped four-and-a-half months in," she admits. "Not surprisingly, although in my head I was superwoman - after all, I'd just won this show and I had to prove myself to everybody - I pushed myself too much. I hadn't had a day off. Then I went on when I had a cold. A blood vessel burst in my throat. I didn't feel it but it made me lose my voice completely.

"I had voice rehab - a combination of gentle vocal exercises and practice, learning how to strengthen your vocal chords. I also have vocal massage, a sort of neck massage that relaxes the throat. People were very supportive, they gave me everything I needed to pull me through."

There was a major fuss in the press about Connie's illness. In fact, she missed only three weeks of performances. "I was pushed a little to come back," she says carefully. "I don't like to think what would have happened if I'd taken any more time off because everyone wanted my head on a stick at the time but it feels now as if it never happened. I feel like a stronger Connie, both vocally and as a person."

After she returned she used a backing track to augment her voice in the first performances. "It wasn't me miming in any way," she insists. "I didn't train for three years in musical theatre to mime." She shakes her head. "I didn't want to be thought of as the next Martine McCutcheon. I had trained really hard. I love musical theatre - it's sad how much I love it - so to lose it after four months was devastating."

Looking back, she realises she was over-ambitious about performing eight shows a week. She has learned to take her health seriously - and does only six now. "You can push yourself and push yourself but no one will thank you at the end of the day. If you give a below-par performance, the audience don't have much faith in you. If I'm ill or I'm tired, I will take a night off now because I know people would rather see me in great form than know they have been part of my downfall."

She still gets regular massages from a physio but trips to the gym have fallen by the wayside, even though her boyfriend Neal is a personal trainer. "We have a few bits and bobs in our house, not heavy machines. But, to be honest, climbing a mountain every night, and lifting kids and jumping over sofas keeps you trim."

The public took to Connie because of her naturalness, her lack of artifice. She was the reality star it was OK to love. She has been called as wholesome as a pot of vegan yoghurt. But, inevitably, her life has changed over the past year. Before we meet, I hear rumours of a makeover and that she has dropped two dress sizes since winning the series. Has the people's Maria become a bit of a diva?

Actually, she seems just the same: an endearing, slight figure in turquoise sweater and jeans - the only flamboyant touch a pair of glittery earrings. As for the weight loss, she says: "I was a size 12 and now I'm a 10, but that's because I'm not sitting in front of a telephone all day - I was in telesales before I became Maria. And before that, waitressing at Pizza Express - to be honest I'd happily eat pizza every night. But on stage I perspire a lot and it keeps you thin. Everyone says I'm curvaceous now so I'm happy with that. If I had to get naked in a film, though, I'd be at the gym every day."

She is modest about her looks. Her childhood nickname was "Paperboy". "I've always been a bit of a tomboy. I never really looked very glam. I was probably the biggest Maria. I have chunky thighs." Her teeth are her major hang-up: she's only just started to smile in photos. "I have large incisors, like fangs." She was once compared to a monster in Doctor Who by a reviewer - she admit it still hurts.

Casting directors have never seen her as "cool". Back in April 2006, she was ready to leave London as a failure. Two years out of drama school, she had been rejected by every West End show going. She was earning just £6 an hour in a call centre and having to live on handouts from her mother and her grandmother's pension.

It was a terrible comedown for the Girl Most Likely to Succeed. Age 19, she had won a full scholarship to Mountview drama school (she was a year above Hairspray's Leanne Jones). When she graduated she won the prestigious Gyearbuor Asante award for acting. The previous year's winner, Kelly Price, went on to star with Ewan McGregor in Guys and Dolls. Her tutors predicted a similarly golden future for Fisher. But by 22 she believed she was washed up.

As one last throw of the dice, in May last year she joined the queue to audition for the BBC1 reality show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Against the odds, she won. The same lack of cool that casting directors didn't "get" endeared her to the show's 10 million viewers.

Her first-night reviews in November 2006 were ecstatic. "She is the first real Maria I've seen," declared this paper's theatre critic, Nicholas de Jongh. She went on to win the Critics' Circle Awards Most Promising Newcomer.

Fisher has grit. She jokes that working in telesales toughened her up. "Although when people reject you in auditions they don't swear at you and hang up." She needed all her stamina when The News of the World claimed she had been unfaithful to her soldier boyfriend, Neal, and was having an affair with the show's sound engineer, Leigh Davies. According to the newspaper, Fisher and Davies were spotted kissing in alleyways and holding hands.

Connie tells me it was totally untrue. They were simply linking arms on the way to get a sandwich - "in that thespian way". What hurts her is that she and Leigh are great friends and the friendship was damaged (Leigh's girlfriend was also doorstepped). "It upset both of our relationships for a while."

She and Neal are still very much together but it was a testing time. "It's horrid when you get your 84-year-old nan ringing up saying: 'Is it true? Have you done this?' 'No, I haven't, Nan.'" Reporters even rang her friends on their mobiles, desperate for dirt. "I suppose I should have expected it but it's such a life-changing thing."

Neal, 27, has served twice in Iraq but now he's a personal trainer and a radio technician working for the Territorial Army. They live together in South-east London. "We've been together four-and-a-half years now. He knows who I am. He says: 'Connie, you haven't changed, it's everyone around you.'"

Christmas will be spent in Wales with her mother and grandmother and Neal's mother, a widow. "His father died three years ago very suddenly. We've been through so much now as a couple."

Growing up in rural Pembrokeshire, Fisher didn't have life easy. Her father, a former army signalman, ran off with another woman. "I thought I had a wonderful childhood until, at 17, it all went pear-shaped. I overheard my dad say, 'We must discuss life after Connie,' and I thought, 'OK, I know what's coming.' I didn't want to admit it because I live in a happy musical world. But," she brightens, "as every actor knows, if you have a bit of heartache in your life you can always use it in your art. It makes you more creative, more in touch with your emotions."

It was her mother Janet and grandmother Dorothy who supported her through drama school. "We're very much a female family now: a little triad." She has, however, always unconsciously felt she was achieving for two people. As a teenager she learned that she had had a twin brother who died just a few days after she was born.

"I've never felt alone, even as an only child. But I've always felt without something. Not quite complete." The news about her twin slipped out over a family dinner party. But early on, she says she remembers finding photographs of two prams, one empty. "It kind of made sense but I didn't want to admit it. I thought, 'I'll wait until they tell me.'"

She and her brother were tiny when they were born. "My dad said he could hold me in the palm of his hand. So I think there was a bit of a struggle. I suppose I stole all the oxygen," she laughs poignantly. Her brother was very much in her thoughts on opening night of The Sound of Music. "My mum doesn't talk about it very much but there are emotional times when she says: 'You've done this for your brother.'"

Now she's determined to prove herself as a proper actress. She'd love to do Shakespeare - she played Viola at drama school - or an edgy Royal Court play. When she leaves the show on 23 February, she'll start filming the prime-time ITV drama Caught in a Trap about an obsessive Elvis fan, based on a true story.

She won't be sorry to lose the "nun" haircut. And she's finally getting her teeth fixed. "I have some sort of jaw issue as well. I've got quite a big jaw. Big mouth," she jokes. London's Thurloe Street Dental Group is fitting her with a clear brace (called Invisalign). "You change the trays every three weeks and your teeth are forced to move into a different position so they realign. I think watching myself for 90 minutes on TV, I have to sort them out because I will be more picky about my teeth than my acting."

In the past year, she says she's grown up enormously. "I'm much wiser. Like Maria in The Sound of Music, I was always late for everything because I didn't enjoy my job. Now I know I really, really want to get there because I love it." As for her success - it's a tribute to her family's support. "It's lovely to get your first job and show them what you spent three years and £28,000 of someone else's money training for."

When Joseph Met Maria, a Christmas special about Connie Fisher and Lee Mead, is on BBC1 on Christmas Eve.

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