For a diva, always looking her best is of paramount importance; lighting, hair and make-up have to be just right. So it took a supreme effort of will for Mariah Carey, the singer whose name is synonymous with glamour and prima donna-ish behaviour, to undergo the transformation required to portray a drab social worker in the emotional film drama Precious.
She shudders at what she went through. “It was overhead lighting, all fluorescent hideous. Very hideous.” She screws up her face in distaste at the recollection. “I had dark circles under my eyes and a little moustache. The hair was disgusting, and the clothes were horrible.
“I really had to let go of any vanity and not care about my good side or my bad side. I had to strip down everything I am and become a completely different woman and put myself in her shoes and understand how it felt every day to be with people just asking you for money.” She pauses for a moment and laughs: “Now that's something I can relate to.”
But, she concedes, the result was well worth the horrors involved. She is almost unrecognisable in the small but powerful role, which earned her a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and has led to speculation that she could grab an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
She was picked for the role after Helen Mirren backed out at the last minute and is part of an eclectic cast that also includes musician Lenny Kravitz, comedienne Mo'Nique and 25-year-old newcomer Gabby Sidibe.
Directed by Lee Daniels, Precious (full title Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire) is set in Harlem in 1987 and is the powerful and disturbing story of an obese teenage black girl whose life is a hell on earth. Pregnant for the second time by her father and bullied and abused both emotionally and physically by her mother, she can neither read nor write. Threatened with expulsion from school she is offered the chance to transfer to an alternative school, where she finds understanding and help.
The film won the audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto and critics have hailed the cast's performances, singling out Carey for special praise.
Surprisingly, the singer with a multi-octave range and a reputation for being difficult and demanding is on time for our appointment in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, sweeping in with an entourage of a dozen publicists, assistants and bodyguards. One of her assistants is ready with the information that Mariah is wearing a brown Oscar de la Renta T-shirt, black Ralph Lauren pencil skirt and knee-high Gucci boots. Her hair cascades in tawny curls on to her shoulders.
She is friendly enough but appears somewhat unfocused. This is, she says, because she had only 80 minutes' sleep the previous night — “I was out being a bad girl.” She does not elaborate but remarks several times that she is feeling sleepy and frequently sips a cola through a straw because, she says, she is “trying to stay caffeinated.” Talking in a Long Island drawl, she is playful, thoughtful and philosophical.
Receiving praise for her acting is a novel experience for 39-year-old Carey, who made her feature film debut in 2001 in Glitter. That film opened to scathing reviews and was described by some critics as one of the worst movies ever made. Carey was savaged for her wooden performance and won the Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress of the year.
“It's still kind of a sore spot for me, but I think I learned something from it, which is that it is all about the material,” she says. “I wanted to do independent movies, but people wanted to put me into something where I was playing a star. So I think that was forced upon me rather than me being allowed to do what I really wanted, which was to lose myself in a character and really be an actress.”
Despite the accolades now coming her way, acting is very much a sideline for the pop diva who triumphed within an industry that she perceived as being biased against her mixed ethnicity to become the biggest-selling female artist of all time.
Since making her recording debut in 1990, she has become the first recording artist to top the US charts with her first five singles; she has had 18 number-one singles — the most for any solo artist; and she has sold 200 million albums, singles and videos worldwide, earning five Grammy awards.
Her parents, an African-American father and an Irish-American mother, divorced when she was three, and her mother, an opera singer and voice coach, gave her singing lessons. By the time she was in high school she was well on her way to a singing career, frequently skipping classes to perform as a backing singer at local recording studio.
She relates, she says, to the plight of the teenage Precious. “Like her, I always felt like an outsider growing up because it's very difficult when you come from an interracial family. It was an identity crisis for me because I didn't feel either white or black. So it was kind of a journey of self-discovery, trying to figure out who I was and who I should relate to. Was it my mother or my father?”
Her life changed dramatically in 1988 when, aged 18, she went to a party and met Tommy Mottola, the Columbia Records executive 20 years her senior who was to become her Svengali and husband. She gave him her demo disc and later, after listening to it and marvelling at the range of her voice, Mottola tracked her down and signed her.
Her debut album, Mariah Carey, reached the top spot on the Billboard charts, produced four number-one singles and won her two Grammy awards. She dominated the music scene throughout the Nineties, but she and Mottola separated in 1997 amid rumours of violence and reports that Carey felt trapped by her overly controlling husband.
Her career skidded downhill in the early Noughties, propelled by poor album sales, a bad case of food poisoning, a plagiarism lawsuit, Glitter and a hospital stay to recuperate from what her publicist called “an emotional and physical breakdown.”
She battled back, appearing in two low-budget but well-received movies — Wise Girls and State Property 2 — and returned to form musically in a big way with the 2005 album, The Emancipation of Mimi.
She launched her own fragrance, co-starred in the movie Tennessee and this year released her 12th album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel. She co-wrote and co-produced all the songs except one, all of which deal with varying aspects of love.
It is a fitting theme because Carey is 18 months into a happy second marriage, to actor, rapper and TV host Nick Cannon, whom she married in a small, surprise ceremony in the Bahamas last year. She wears a diamond pendant bearing the letters MCC which was designed for her by Cannon.
“People were surprised when we got married, but it seemed like the right thing to do and wasn't anything out of the ordinary for us,” she says. “I definitely feel more complete than before. There's a void you have when you don't feel you've found the other part of who you are, so I'm in a different place now and that's nice to experience. I think being able to collaborate with
Nick and being in a really great place in my life is having a great impact on my music.”
Money, success and awards notwithstanding, she would have us believe it's not easy being Mariah Carey, and she may well be right. “I'm very hard on myself and I have too many issues,” she says. “It's difficult for me to relax. I work myself into the ground. But I think I'm a nice friend and a good person, and I try to do my work as best I can.”
