I thought it might be a nice idea to make a seperate post where we can read the interviews etc. telling life stories thus far as told my our own guys.  

I thought I would make this a locked post so that we could just refer back when we feel like a read.   I will post the location of the original thread so that comments can still be made there.

I will start with the interview with Lucy:

Everyone can sing, that’s why I love it

the opera

world's hottest star

11.08.07

One of Tsakane Maswanganyi's earliest memories is of playing with her friends on the dust track outside her grandparents' house in the South African township of Soweto. She was four, maybe five years old.

She remembers the sound of laughter, the clear brightness of a sunlit morning and then, out of the corner of her eye, a thin trickle of smoke.

"Suddenly everyone's screaming, 'Come in, come inside!' she says now.

"And you're legging it inside the house and you can't breathe properly because it's tear gas.

Scroll down for more

28-year-old Tsakane Maswanganyi is singing the title role in Carmen Jones

"But it's just life. I didn't know anything different. When you are brought up in that world, things are the way they are."

For all that she insists her life was unexceptional, it is clear Tsakane has travelled a long way from the ramshackle shanty towns of her youth.

Now 28, she is singing the title role in Carmen Jones, the Oscar Hammerstein musical based on Georges Bizet's 1875 opera, at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The hotly anticipated production, which opened this week, has been met by rave reviews and a sold-out auditorium, thanks largely to Tsakane's electric stage presence and stunning voice.

Her combination of supermodel looks and musical talent was likened by one reviewer to "the product of the loins of Naomi Campbell and Sir Willard White".

She is, indeed, strikingly beautiful, with feline, kohl-rimmed eyes, sharp cheekbones and hair that stands on end like a hundred exclamation marks.

Her success is the culmination of an extraordinary journey. From an impoverished upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa, Tsakane has become one of the most exciting classical singers of her generation, praised by the critics for her "magnetic grace" and "sultry assurance".

Yet, astonishingly, she is almost entirely self-taught because the separate "Bantu" education system for black children that operated when she was growing up did not allow for luxuries such as music lessons.

She was born in 1979, three years after the Soweto uprising that left 566 dead, and was raised for the first eight years of her life by her grandparents, Hosiah, a preacher, and Evodia, a teacher.

Scroll down for more

Tsakane, aged two with her mother

"It's a tradition that you spend a few years with your grandparents who groom you and give you the knowledge," she says, wolfing down a smoked mackerel and potato salad in preparation for the evening's performance.

"You see your parents all the time. It was strict, but in a good, disciplined way.

"I was happy as a child. When you're really young, you don't have all the angry emotions. I was too young to understand exactly the way things were working.

"Of course, there are policemen bashing on your door and that is frightening because you wonder what is going on, but I was not hugely aware."

When she was eight, she went to live with her parents, Helen, a teacher, and Alex, a sales representative, in Giyani, a sprawling, dusty town 300 miles north-east of Johannesburg, 25 miles from the edge of the vast Kruger Park.

The town, which was founded in 1969, was the administrative centre of Gazankulu, one of the semi-autonomous black homelands that the apartheid government created in its dogmatic pursuit of "separate development".

Scroll down for more

Humble beginnings: One of the houses in Giyani, the South African town where Tsakane Maswanganyi grew up

Today, it is a bustling, nondescript commercial centre, but there is still terrible poverty.

More than half the population is unemployed and almost 90 per cent of people who do have jobs earn less than £25 a week.

More than 21 per cent of the municipality's 500,000 population is illiterate.

Giyani's citizens, however, refuse to be worn down by their harsh environment.

The town motto is "Work hard to achieve", and Tsakane's success is a cause for great pride.

With no cinemas or theatres, Tsakane depended on the town's numerous school and church choirs for entertainment, and it was through them that she learned her craft at Risinga High School, where she studied until she graduated.

The principal, Hlengani G. Hlungwani, remembers the singer as an academically average child but a valued member of the school choir.

"She was soft spoken, you couldn't read much about her but she was a strong personality," he says.

"When she was selected to sing solo she was never afraid."

Scroll down for more

As a 15-year-old pupil with friends at Risanga High School

Tsakane also sang with her three brothers in the choir at her mother's church, the Evangelical Presbyterian in Giyani West.

The choirmaster, Leslie Makatu, says Tsakane was an outgoing and confident child who had obvious talent and was eager to learn.

"There were signs that she had a good voice but she had to work until she became a good singer," he says.

"She loved singing and she was always trying to improve. She liked listening to opera, which is quite unusual."

At school, however, there were no official music lessons.

"I didn't know you could study music – I just thought it was a pastime thing," says Tsakane now.

"But I remember being very interested in music. My dad subscribed to Reader's Digest.

"He got 12 cassettes called The History Of Classical Music and I used to listen to them again and again and loved them.

Scroll down for more

Starring in Carmen Jones

"Then, after seeing an opera on television when I was 13, I got really interested."

Did she ever feel resentful that she was not given the same opportunities as her white contemporaries?

"Not exactly. Growing up in Giyani, there were no white people [to compare myself to]. And again, I had a better life than people who lived in really rough places without water or electricity and had to walk miles and miles just to get water.

"Apartheid in South Africa was about the minority oppressing the majority, so the first thing that happened was people were kicked out of their homes in the centre of cities to the surrounding places.

"So in the centre you have all the big houses for the white people. I remember when I went into town or a city I really noticed it.

"I would look at all the houses and go, 'Wow! People live like this?'

"But you are where you are and you can't do anything about it.

"The struggle came really when I started going to university and I couldn't really afford all the fees."

Tsakane went to the University of Pretoria, originally to do a degree in public relations after being told she would not be able to study music without having taken lessons in school.

When a student she met in the first week mentioned that it was possible to do a "bridging course", she switched immediately.

"When you have to write an assignment, there's no way you can have a computer, you have to write 20 pages by hand," she says.

"If you had a concert, you'd try to find a dress so you're glamorous on stage, but you don't have a car to get home.

"All that is the result of the apartheid period. But it made me want to succeed."

She attributes some of this determination to the example set by Nelson Mandela, who was jailed by the South African government for 27 years.

"He was a hero. I remember that one of the things we weren't allowed to say when we were young was 'Mandela hey' or 'Viva Mandela' because it was too sensitive, too dangerous. We all loved him and wanted him to be released.

"I remember the day he came out we were all glued to our TV to see what he looked like, what he was going to do, what was going to happen. What a day that was.

"I remember watching everything, every step. Thinking of this man who had been in jail for 27 years and what it means to us, you know?"

By the time she graduated in 1999, she was singing at the State Theatre in Pretoria.

Other prestigious roles followed – as Musetta in La Boheme for the Roodepoort City Opera and Maria in West Side Story for the Spier Festival in Cape Town.

In 2003 she came to the UK to join the four-person "popera" group Amici, recording three albums – which between them have sold £1.5million copies worldwide – and touring in Europe, Australia and America.

Then, earlier this year, she was offered the role of Carmen.

She says: "It's a fun role for me to play. I don't get very nervous and I'm not one of those singers who has to be careful about not eating certain things.

"I eat everything. Stodge is my kind of food. I think I have a very fast metabolism."

Based in Sydenham, South-East London, for the past four years, she returns to South Africa twice a year to catch up with her family.

Her parents split up shortly before she went to university. Her father died last year, but her mother still lives in the same neat pink bungalow on a carefully tended plot where Tsakane grew up.

Soweto itself, she says, has changed very little – "the houses have been repainted" – but she still hankers after the easy pace of life in Giyani.

"I miss the weather, the kids playing around in the street. The dust, the earth ...You can be there and not care about lipstick or anything like that, you can just sit around lazy, picking fruit from the trees.

"We have about 16 mango trees in our garden and I miss that.

"If I'm working in London, I have to buy mangos in the supermarket and I think, 'Oh I'm buying mangos when I could be picking them for free at home,' and it feels very weird."

Back in Giyani, the mango trees are bearing fruit and the new members of the Risinga High School choir will soon be practising for their next performance.

"Our motto is, 'We are the best of the best,' says Mr Hlungwani.

"We tell the kids, 'No pain, no gain.'

For Tsakane Maswanganyi, a rising star who made it against incredible odds, the sentiment seems particularly apt.

http://www.amiciforever.com/forums/5/100639/ShowThread.aspx