What the new My Fair Lady really thinks of Martine

by LYNDA LEE-POTTER, Daily Mail

My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, is packed every night, and it's a bewitching show. The highly strung Martine McCutcheon has been replaced by Lancastrian Joanna Riding, who arrives on her motorbike.

She's earning a lot of money for the first time in her life, though it's nothing compared with Martine's salary.

Joanna is a highly trained, disciplined theatre actress, not a television star, and she makes an enchanting Eliza Doolittle.

'Originally,' she says, 'it was a brilliant idea, to get a Cockney lass to play Eliza. Most of the British public adore Martine because of East-Enders. It's just that it backfired because it was a tall order to ask a kid with little theatre experience to do such a vocally demanding role.

'She was fabulous, but the job description is "playing Eliza Doolittle several times a week". She's always getting ill. I don't know whether it's psychosomatic but she doesn't seem to be one of life's strongest people.'

Joanna grew up on a Lancashire farm, where her father ran a successful cheese-making business.

At 17, she went to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. When she left, she got a job as Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz at Chichester and became involved in the break-up of Felicity Kendal's marriage to director Michael Rudman.

'Felicity said she'd had a letter telling her that Michael was having an affair with me,' says Joanna. 'It wasn't true at all, and it was horrible. We hit it off but he was like a father figure.

Michael was very upset, it really broke him. Tom Stoppard was already on the scene, and I was the scapegoat because I was the young blonde and Felicity was the nation's sweetheart.'

In fact, Joanna was in love with her co-star, Australian actor Peter O'Brien, who played Shane Ramsay in Neighbours. They met at Chichester and a year later they married, which was the beginning of the end.

'Unfortunately, he was one of those guys who changed after we were married. He got really possessive, and critical of how I dressed or who I spoke to.

'I remember him running towards me at Chichester, all excited. He asked me to marry him and I said "No". Then he kept working on me and in the end I agreed, but it should have been just an affair.'

Joanna's parents married when they were very young, and they gave her and their four other children an idyllic, loving, outdoor childhood amid the wild Lancashire hills.

But the happy family was devastated by tragedy when Joanna's brother Alan died after a heart operation.

'He was only 16, a year younger than me, and I don't think my parents will ever come to terms with it. I remember afterwards going into Alan's room and Mum would be crying on his bed and holding his photograph.

'You can't even begin to imagine the grief, and they blamed themselves. They always will, because they were of a generation who believed doctors, and they had kept telling Mum nothing was wrong with him.

'We were a very sporty family, always water-skiing and walking up hills. Alan struggled to keep up, but none of us really realised how difficult it was for him. I was a horrible little brat and when he said his chest hurt, I'd say: "Oh stop moaning."

'Then he had a heart attack and Mum took him to hospital. The surgeon looked at him and said: "Why haven't we had this boy before?" Imagine what that does to a parent.

'They operated straight away and they said when he was older he'd need a bypass, but they couldn't do it then because he was too young.'

Alan returned home for two years and seemed much better, but his health suddenly deteriorated and he was rushed into Liverpool Children's hospital.

'There was a strong risk of rejection if they gave him a bypass because he was still growing, which makes it harder for the body to accept anything.

'They went for it anyway. They got the heart started, but he had the heart of an old man. It had had to do too much work in the brief years that he'd lived. So it stopped again and he died on the operating table.'

Alan was cremated, and before the funeral he lay in his coffin in the living room of the farm.

'He had golden blond, curly hair and I so wanted something of him,' says Joanna. 'I went into the kitchen, took out the scissors and I cut off a lock of his hair. I kept it but I didn't tell anyone.

'Then, a year later on his birthday, I came downstairs and Mum was in a terrible way. She was crying and saying: "I wish I hadn't had him cremated, I wish I had something of his, I wish I could smell him." I went upstairs and I brought down this lock of hair.'

Joanna was devastated by sadness and guilt over Alan's death. 'I'll live my life for both of us,' she vowed.

'You have grief,' she says now, 'and you have anger. You're angry at yourself for not having made the most of your time with him. Alan had barely become a teenager and it was all taken away from him.'

Since her brother's death she scarcely seems to have stopped running, and she has an almost tangible dynamism. 'I get angry when I waste time. And at New Year I'm upset because another year has gone.'

Now she lives with Scottish musical director Douglas White, who is on tour with Sunset Boulevard.

She adores him but still feels guilty about her previous boyfriend, Ben, who is the technical manager of London's Shaftesbury Theatre. They lived together for six years and she thought it was a relationship for ever.

'I was far more married to Ben than I was to Peter, but I ran away with another man. Ben never put a foot wrong and thankfully we're still very good friends, which is down to him. I've broken his heart but he has no bitterness.

'Douglas and I met on tour with Martin Guerre and became good friends. We'd go early to the theatre and talk about music. He'd play the piano and we'd sing. One night I said: "The chemistry is good."

'We went to Newcastle, then Glasgow, and in the end we stepped over the line in Aberdeen.

'It was utterly wonderful but then I couldn't bear what I'd done. The relationship actually went backwards after that because I thought: "I'm playing with people's emotions here."

'Ben came to stay for a while and the tour ended, and I did the most rotten thing and just ran away. I left them both stewing.

'I was in such a mess, not really knowing where I was. I went to Sicily on holiday and immersed myself for three entire weeks in swimming and surfing.

'I hardly spoke on the phone to either of them. They didn't know what I was thinking or feeling, but when I got back it was Douglas I went to see.

'If someone hurt Ben I'd be there fighting for him, yet I was the one who hurt him most.

'Ben is deaf and he wears hearing aids. Without them he doesn't hear very much, so he's had to battle through that all his life.

'He loved me singing to him, but he never felt that he could participate in music. So then, of course, I have to go off with a musician.'

Joanna and Douglas have been together for three years, but she still feels raw over Ben's pain.

Initially, she vowed she wasn't going to walk away from him. 'Ben and I stayed cohabiting in the flat for quite some time after I'd made the decision. I couldn't just say: "On your bike, I don't care any more." I do care, I still love him. I tried to make a go of it, but I thought: "Ben deserves better than being second fiddle." '

She helped him to find another flat, and she remains involved in his life.

'He wanted me around still. I'd go over and we'd talk and cry. He's such a gentle, sensitive creature, I felt that was the right thing to do. But maybe it was not the most helpful way.'

Joanna is funny and very pretty with irresistible, gamine charm, and it's easy to see why Ben finds it impossible to cut her out of his life. He never asks her about Douglas, but there is a shining incandescence about her which reveals the truth.

When she talks about him, she can't stop smiling. 'Douglas is just lovely: wonderful, so talented, but quiet and unassuming and warm with a lovely Ayrshire accent. I'm not into cuddly men, and he's extremely lean - you see more fat on a chip.

'He's on tour but we speak every day. I don't like going to bed without ringing to say goodnight. I suppose the closest you get to knowing what it feels like to be a parent is when you love someone so much that you worry when they're away from you.'

She's at an exciting time in her career and she has not only the talent but the discipline to become a star.

However, the focused, ambitious girl is beginning to yearn for a baby.

'For a long time I really didn't want children. But last year I went through what I can only describe as my body clock going dang-alanga-lang.

'I'd get on a train and I'd see a mother with a young baby. I'd open a paper or a magazine and everywhere there were pictures of babies.

'And yes, I do want a child with Douglas. I'm 34 and I can't leave it much longer, can I? A lot depends on Douglas's situation, because he's a brilliant composer.

'He's only 30, and he was a late starter in his career. He needs to be allowed to feel free and to be fairly selfish. He's too talented not to have his chance.'

Joanna is contracted to play Eliza in My Fair Lady until February 2003. 'I'll be 35 then,' she says, 'so maybe that will be the time.'