Happy Russell is back in tune with life and love

Having successfully fought two brain tumours there’s no doubt that Russell Watson has been to hell and back in recent years but you’d never know it from meeting him now. Sitting in his west London hotel room, brimming with excitement about his starring role in Kristina, the new musical from Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, the tenor is the picture of rude health. He’s also loved-up, admitting exclusively that he’s in his first relationship for almost five years.

Russell is just back from lunch at Marco Pierre White restaurant the Belvedere and halfway through getting changed when I arrive, meaning he’s sitting in a smart black shirt and jumper teamed with such a small pair of blue shorts that I’m not sure where to look. “That’s really bad, isn’t it?” he asks, nodding towards the shorts.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Well, at least they emphasise that Russell, 43, is looking toned and fi t. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006 and, although it was removed, it returned a year later, demanding a second life-threatening operation and radiotherapy. “That was hell,” he says. Neither he nor his loved ones dared to believe he’d pull through, to see the day he’d star in Kristina at the Royal Albert Hall.

With its impeccable songwriting credentials, Kristina is guaranteed to be a hit, although it sounds rather more challenging than Mamma Mia!.

It’s a three-hour symphonic opera telling the story of a Swedish family’s emigration to America in search of a better life.

Ulvaeus and Andersson organised workshops across the US to find their perfect leading man, Karl-Oskar.

They failed, so Watson received a call from a record company contact who arranged for him to fl y to Stockholm for an informal audition.

In Benny’s studio, Watson sang along to a tune from the opera The Elixir Of Love and when he hit the top note of the required two-octave range, Benny started laughing with delight. “He looked round and said, ‘Wow!’ ” says Russell. First Björn was summoned to the studio, then their leading lady Helen Sjöholm. Five minutes after they sang a duet, Russell was offered the part outright.

For Russell, it was a hard-won reward for two years spent tirelessly “reconstructing” his voice, moving way beyond the point where hitting top notes made him feel faint and dizzy. Now, though? “My voice isn’t as good as it was,” he says, “it’s better.” Russell describes Kristina as being about “love and family and devotion and commitment and death”, themes that struck such a personal chord during the musical’s Carnegie Hall debut last September that he broke down in tears. “I’m holding my wife in my arms as she’s dying and the music just got me. It was like a tidal wave of emotion that cracked me,” he says.

After the show, Russell was walking through the Carnegie Hall lobby when a stranger stopped him in his tracks. “She said, ‘Oh my Garrd! Are you Karl-Oskar? That performance was just amazing! Those tears! They just seemed so real!’ I thought, ‘Er, they were…’ ‘My Garrd, I love your voice, you’re totally amazing, I’m going to stalk you!’ Then all of a sudden my eyes doubled in size because I realised,

‘Holy ****! It’s Meryl Streep!’ ” Watson’s 13-year marriage to Helen ended in 2001, though he’s almost inseparable from his daughters Rebecca, 15, and Hannah, nine. He then split from Roxanne, his American girlfriend of four years, almost five years ago. Since then, his health has taken precedence over his love life. “I’ve come through that tunnel,” he says. “My focus is now on being happy.”

As it happens, life is very much looking up on that score. “Just a few weeks ago I met a very pleasant lady,” he says coyly, explaining that they met in a restaurant near his Cheshire home.

So he started chatting to a stranger in a restaurant? “That’s how it generally happens, isn’t it?” he says, laughing but refusing to tell me what she does, simply saying: “She’s lovely.

“I’m surprised I mentioned her,” he adds ruefully, “but I haven’t had a proper relationship in years. It’s because I’m feeling better.”

At the same time, his career is almost taking care of itself. He has signed a generous deal with Sony to release an autumn album, to be recorded in Rome with Ennio Morricone’s orchestra. He’s playing an outdoor concert practically every weekend this summer. He is even in talks with the BBC, pitching a TV series summarised as “classical music for dummies”.

“It just feels good to be alive and still doing what I love and what I was born to do. Everything is so much more meaningful when you’ve nearly died.”

Russell Watson performs in the UK debut of Kristina at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, on Wednesday.

Source:  Sunday Express