Sarah Brightman wasn’t the first choice to sing the iconic song Amigos Para Siempre for the 1992 Olympics in Madrid with José Carreras.
It is still touted as one of the greatest Olympic songs of all time, its message of unity, friendship and love serving as the perfect celebration of the games.
Brightman, 64, spoke with 9honey ahead of her star turn playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard which hits Sydney from August 28 to November 1 following a successful run in Melbourne.
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She reflected on the Olympic song’s success.
“I think it’s just a really good piece, just a good song,” she tells 9honey. “It’s something everybody could sing along to.”
Brightman says she “wasn’t originally meant to do it”, however a tragic accident proved fortuitous for the seasoned opera singer.
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“It was offered to Gloria Estefan because she’s Spanish and Spanish-speaking. For the Olympics they wanted people who were of their race,” Brightman explains.
“But Gloria had a bad accident.”
Estefan, 66, was involved in a serious bus accident in 1990 when she was at the height of her career, leaving her with a broken back that would take years to recover from.
“Because the composer knew how my voice worked … he knew I could immediately come in and do it,” she recalls.
“So that was why I ended up doing Barcelona.”
Brightman would be asked to perform at the Olympics a second time for the Beijing games in 2008, a song called You and Me with Chinese artist Liu Huan. This time around, she was the first to be asked.
“I’m a very big Western star in China,” Brightman shares. “I never tried to be, it just happened because my music got across to them and they loved it.”
She’s also a major star in Japan and served as a judge on the Japanese talent show Project X in 2022.
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Brightman says it was easy to tell which contestants had star quality.
“You know immediately the one that shines true, and so it’s not that difficult in a way, because you’re not really necessarily thinking, is this song a hit or is it not, or is that dance a hit,” she explains.
“You’re looking at the person. Because at the end of the day, what makes people stars, and what makes them more successful than other people, is they have that extra thing that makes them shine and you can’t explain it.”
Brightman also possesses star quality, and has done from an early age. Her first time performing on stage was at the age of 11 in a show called I’m Albert in her native England, in London.
”I was a competition child, meaning that I competed in my own country and festivals that they had from the age of three and that was singing, dancing, acting, all of those things,” she recalls.
“I always had a voice,” she says.
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It wasn’t until she was 17 that she began her proper training as an opera singer. She has also enjoyed success as a pop singer, in addition to theatrical performances beginning with a role in Cats then The Pirates of Penzance, Masquerade and Nightingale.
Her work attracted the attention of former husband, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who is said to have based the role of Christine Daaé in Phantom of the Opera on her, his muse.
Her latest role as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard is perfectly timed.
“The role needs a more sort of mature artist because all the experience that Norma Desmond’s character has and what she’s been through, she’s had a huge career and then gone down and everything’s gone away,” she says.
Sunset Boulevard follows Norma Desmond as she struggles with the end of the silent movie era in which she was a major star.
Brightman has also witness rapid change that has seen her profession transform, particular as a recording artist who began by releasing vinyl records, then cassettes, CDs, and now song downloads, not to mention the crucial role social media plays in promoting her work.
“So I was able to draw upon what I’d seen just in our era,” Brightman says. “It’s actually quite a modern piece in a way.”
Book your tickets to see Sunset Boulevard at the Sydney Opera House from August 28 to November 1 here.
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