Sarah Brightman
By Janie Lawrence
Daily Mail
December 10, 2000
 

"It took me a year to get over losing my baby....but I am not going to panic that it's too late to get pregnant again."

Sarah Brightman has endured the loss of her unborn baby, the suicide of her father and two marriage breakdowns. She tells Janie Lawrence how she overcame these tragedies and also reveals why she hasn't touched a penny of Andrew Lloyd Webber's £6 million divorce settlement Sarah Brightman. You wouldn't have thought that the two words were capable of evoking such an extreme reaction. Of course she is a truly awful Grande dame, declare some, while others simply snort in derision. Invariably, everybody alludes to her former marriage to ALW. Astonishingly, they also remember the 1978 single 'I lost my heart to a Starship Trooper', when she was a member of the dance troupe Hot Gossip. Nobody, but nobody mentions her extraordinary voice, or the albums that have according to this years annual list of the nation's highest-paid women, helped her reach number ten with a reported income of £4 million.

 When we met in Stockholm, the strain of her current world tour La Luna, also the name of her forthcoming album, is beginning to tell. After 50 shows she is nursing a painful back injury. But no, her behavior is not that of a prima donna. Rather she is all good natured smiles as she curls this way and that in an armchair, desperately trying to get comfortable. Only a week ago, her physiotherapist told her that her back hasn't a hope of improving until she takes a rest. But that wouldn't be Brightman's style. She is, by her own admission, a driven individual. 'Very: I have to get something out'.

Which is possibly just one of the reasons why she has elicited some gratuitously viscous press comments in the past - not least about her appearance. In truth, that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look is substantially diminished in the flesh. On stage a vision of dramatic kohl-eyes surprise, today she is wearing no detectable make-up whatsoever. In black combat trousers and trainers, and with an untamed mane that skims her bottom, the look is cute rather than sexy. Her speaking voice too is not as I have envisaged: less little girl, more product of vigorous elocution lessons circa 1940. 'That's what Frankie says' she says laughing, casting a glance towards the Frank in question.

German Frank Peterson, 36, has been her boyfriend and record producer for nine years. After an inauspicious start - 'we'd both come out of divorces and were pretty messed up' - they now live together in his Hamburg apartment. He is neither baron nor count, a joke first instigated by Sir (now Lord) ALW. Still a man less like her ex husband would be hard to envisage. A thoroughly unreconstructed bloke's bloke in leather trousers and earring with a demonstrable preference for bawdy humor, he joins us five minutes after we meet.
'Do you mind?' she asks, 'It's just that he's often better at answering if I get uncommunicative'. That is code speak for 'You're a British journalist and I want back-up'. As he clucks solicitously around her - 'Have some champagne it will numb the pain' - everything about her visibly relaxes. Nevertheless, I am still shocked at the turn out conversation takes when I broach the subject of babies.

She was once reported as saying that work was her baby, but now aged 40, I wonder if her priorities have changed. She looks across to Frank 'I've actually lost a baby' she volunteers hesitantly. Until now she has never talked publicly about this experience, which occurred in April 1998 during yet another grueling world tour. 'I had been working in South Africa and was coming back to Europe to do the rest of the tour. When I got back to Germany I was feeling really sick. I don't know what drove me, but I decided to buy a pregnancy test. When I found out it took me completely by surprise. It wasn't planned at all'. Her face lights up, 'I rang my mum and I rang Frank because I felt great about it' . 

Her joy was short lived. Days later after a 16 hour promotional stint in Montreal, she was en route to Toronto when she collapsed at the airport. Rushed into hospital, it turned out to be a highly dangerous ectopic pregnancy and she subsequently lost the baby. Meanwhile Frank was at home in their Hamburg flat. ' I got a call and they advised me to stay at home saying they would let me know what was happening in two hours' He says. 'The most horrible thing was that I couldn't be there. I felt useless'  In a telephone call afterwards, Sarah broke the news to Frank that the doctors had been compelled to remove one of her fallopian tubes. 'Immediately I said I'd get on a plane', Frank continues, 'but Sarah said "No, stay, I'll be home in three days"' It was a bravura display of stoicism given how the singer really felt. ' I was pretty off the wall for a few days' she admits."I suppose it was all those hormones. For three weeks I was devastated and it took me a year to get over it. Afterwards it was like the soul of the baby was with me, which was extraordinary. Maybe it sounds crazy. It was comforting, but it was quite emotional'. How do the doctors rate her future chances of conception? 'Oh you know, what they always say' she shrugs. 'Fortunately it is, theoretically at least still possible.'

Now she seems determined to pain a Pollyanna patina upon the whole experience. 'I would go as far as to say even though it didn't work out the way I would have liked, I am not unhappy. At least I had the experience. Lots of women never get pregnant. Then maybe because of that they think they're a failure.'   But it must still cause her considerable anguish?  'My only worry is that I do get to a point where it's too late and I can't do anything about it. But I'm not going to panic. Our life is good and I have no complaints'.  Few women who have been in a similar position would wholly understand her sentiments, but then you can't help but think that Sarah cares more than she is prepared to admit or show. Either to others or possibly even herself.  This determination to get on with things crops up repeatedly. 'what else can you do??' she says, 'we all have all sorts of things thrown at us, but you just deal with them'. 

Whether this is an innate aptitude or something she had learned the hard way is difficult to gauge. Certainly her personal life has given her plenty of opportunity to test this ability, with two failed marriages (the first to Andrew Graham-Stewart, a rock band manager, lasted only three years) and, most notably, her father's suicide.

Grenville Brightman was a businessman who asphyxiated himself in his car one grey February Sunday morning in 1992 when he was 57. Sarah was at her mother's flat when the news came through. 'It was something that I had already thought about,' she begins thoughtfully. 'He had stopped sleeping and when that happens you go crazy after a while' At the onlookers were incredulous that on the following Monday evening Sarah still went ahead with her nightly performance of Aspects of Love. Was this, they asked, the gesture of someone unprepared to let anything impinge upon her career? She shakes her head appalled. 'It was something I could grab on to, and focus on; my way of getting through those awful horrific days. I felt as if I was in some kind of middle place. If a parent does something like that, all the things you've been brought up with about how precious life is and why we're here go out of the window'. Eight years after his death she still thinks about him every day. 'Probably quite a few times in a day. You go through that terrible grief but it never really goes away - you just become used to it'.

That occurred so soon after her highly publicised divorce from ALW would have thrown anybody off kilter. The mere mention of the composer produces a barely perceptible sigh. Frankly who can blame her? The marriage did finish in 1990.
'It started off really well' she reflects, 'we really liked each other's company. Life was obviously difficult because both of us were under a lot of pressure. I was working as well as being a social wife, which was the kind of lifestyle he had. I wasn't particularly good at the role and if I played it, it wasn't me". Perhaps fearful of being misinterpreted as her successor, Madeleine Gurdon seems, superficially at any rate, a wholly more appropriate match, she adds hastily ' I'm not saying that type is bad, but it's not me'.
'I think we grew out of each other at exactly the same time', she says although she concedes that being presented with a fait accompli was a 'big shock'. Why didn't she fight for the marriage? '"When someone says they've found someone else and that is what they are going to do you have to go with it', she says. The thing about Brightman is that offstage she isn't much of an emotional diva at all. 'That is not in my nature, I know my ex husband well enough to know he was really serious about it. There was no way it was going to be reversed'. The pair are sufficiently friendly for Sarah to have sung at the composer's 50th birthday party. 'Nobody is pally-pally, but we're fine. I have no problem with his present wife - I never had'.

As a divorce settlement, Sarah received a spectacular sum of £6 million. She has since offered to return it and to this day it remains untouched. 'It's not an issue,' she shrugs 'I make a lot more than that kind of money and I don't need it'. I am in an extremely lucky position to say that nonchalantly'.  Ah so her mooted £4 million annual income correct? She rolls her eyes ' I know people who have been on those lists and they always have a big laugh because they're either way too much or way too little' she says neatly ducking the question.

Yet the singer still lacks musical credibility in her home country, a fact of which she is well aware. 'England is important to me, but if people there don't think I'm credible, a lot of people in America think I am', she says, an edgy note in her voice. Indeed despite her apparent fragility, there's every indication she has a backbone of steel. 'You've got it in a nutshell', she grins, before leaving for physio appointment. There's no question; La Brightman show will go on.

La Luna will be released on East West records on Jan 15th, Sarah Brightman is appearing at the RAH on April 10th.