For Connie Fisher, a radio advert changed her life. The year was 2006 and a 23-year-old Connie, who was born in Northern Ireland but grew up in Pembrokeshire, had been working in telesales after graduating from drama school and, in her words, had been immediately experiencing “tumbleweed” ever since.
Prior to landing the telesales job Connie, who recently turned 40, told the WalesOnline podcast In the Spotlight that she’d been working in Pizza Express. “I was serving really famous people,” she said. “I remember serving Gary Barlow and thinking, well, maybe one day he'll spot me.”
After realising that a position serving pizza was dangerous for her diet, Connie decided to take up the headset and hit the phones. Little did she know that on one shift, the universe would finally present her with the ‘big break’ she’d been looking for since she was a child. Listen to In the Spotlight with Connie Fisher below.
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“I heard on the radio that Andrew Lloyd Webber was looking for a shop girl to play Maria,” Connie says upon recalling the life-changing moment. “I thought, you know, I've trained, but essentially that's what I am right now. I'm basically working in a shop. I've got a nine to five so I went for Maria and really, the rest is history.” For more showbiz and television stories get our newsletter here.
Although she was keen to immediately sign up for the BBC talent show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? - the first of Lloyd Webber’s shows to find his next West End star - Connie’s agent, whom she had acquired after drama school, had reservations. She explained how her agent had told her that it’d be like “Big Brother for musical theatre” to which she replied: “Bring it on!”
And luckily she did as after eight weeks on the show, Connie beat off all of her competition and landed the role of Maria in Lloyd Webber’s version of The Sound of Music. Summarising the experience she said: “I loved it, loved every second. It was a boot camp of musical theatre and it was amazing. It was the best catalyst into the industry I could have hoped for.”
In a previous episode of In the Spotlight (which you can listen to here) West End star Sophie Evans, who also appeared on a Lloyd Webber reality show, described how she and her competitors got on well when she appeared on BBC’s Over the Rainbow. For Connie, who was part of the first iteration of the format, the experience was a little different.
“Everyone was in there to win it,” she recalled. “And the things that were said inside that house were not kind, some of them. Everyone was really competitive. But were we supportive of each other as performers? Yes, it was a showmance. You were supportive of your peers because you respected their talent. But were we friends? I've only retained one friendship. And to be honest with you, in any show, in any cast, if you come away from a show with a real friend, then that is an achievement, because you're just people coming together to create one piece of magic. And friendships are more than that. Friendships are everlasting.”
When asked what her fondest memories of working on the show were, Connie replied: “I love live TV. I remember the countdown in the studio. It was electric and it was just so exciting because of the competition, and you knew that you had just days to prepare for something.”
She added that during recording of the pilot episode, unexpected praise from a chart-topping singer gave her confidence. “Ronan Keating was performing in the pilot episode. They did a pre-record of his performance and he had to decide who would win, in his opinion. I remember he picked me and I could feel the other girls’ eyes burning me. I thought, Ronan Keating thinks I can win this so maybe I could.
“When you go to drama school and graduate with a first class honours degree in musical theatre and then you work in a pizza place before doing telesales for a living, you start to lose belief in yourself. I was losing belief in my ability as a singer, as a performer, as an actor, and just thought, what have I done? How did I end up here at 22 years old? So I think Ronan Keating gave me a boost.”
After winning the role she was born to do, describing how she was frequently compared to Julie Andrews, life became very busy for Connie. Ahead of her first performance of The Sound of Music she detailed how there was intense “scrutiny” from both critics and the general public. “I won on the Saturday and then there was an aftershow party where Lloyd Webber said: ‘You better go home now because you're in the recording studio on Monday.’ We recorded the cast album, then I recorded my album, then I was into six weeks of rehearsals for the show and you didn't have time to blink. Between then and actually getting into a studio rehearsal space was a whirlwind
“Another thing I hadn't quite appreciated when I was going for it was that The Sound Of Music had never had a good review onstage. Nowadays if you don't get four or five stars in the press, who's going to come see your show? We got five stars and that was that, really. We ran and ran and it was the first time the musical had ever had rave reviews.”
The scrutiny also moved into Connie’s private life and she said there was “personal intrusion and invasion”, something she says she didn’t enjoy. Speaking of that time she said it was “hard on relationships”, adding: “Everything I knew changed in a moment when Graham Norton shouted [my name]. My world changed. I would say, in hindsight, for the better. But in the following months, I did question, what is my life going to be like? I need to take control of it because it was no longer my life. I became a commodity overnight and as the years went by, I needed to take that control.”
In 2011 that control was taken out of Connie’s hands when she was diagnosed with congenital sulcus vocalis (holes in her vocal cords). At one point she recalls the ‘heartbreaking’ moment that her doctor told her that she’d never sing again.
She said: “I was heartbroken but hearts mend. You move on and you have to. It's been two decades and in my 20s, it was about being Maria and being Connie. In my 30s, it was about finding my new career, finding a solid career, finding a future for Connie. And last week I turned 40 and I've got twins so it's about them now.
“It was just another knock. When you're in the West End, if you have a weakness then people pounce on that. There was a lot of bullying at the time in the first cast of The Sound of Music. That was mainly, I think, because some of the more seasoned actors didn't like the fact that the audience were a TV audience, rustling their sweets in the front row and going, ‘There's Connie off the telly.’ I loved that. I loved the fact that we had a different audience to theatre but some of the RSC actors or the others in the cast weren't as pleased with the audience and their reaction to our theatre show. There was a lot of bullying towards me at the time.”
Over the last 10 years Connie’s career has transitioned into television and she is now Head of Development at Wildflame Productions, who have worked on a number of different popular programmes. As to why she decided to shift into more of a behind the scenes role she said: “I remember the curtain coming down on one of my tours and I saw it coming down and thought, that's the end of it. No more. No more singing, no more. I just cut it off and I thought: brave, hard, but you can't mourn it, you just have to move on and find another career.”
Connie is also pouring her energy into her husband Jeremy Reed and their twin daughters, whom she calls her “proudest” achievement. “Having Winnie and Rosie was the proudest moment of my life. Through Covid, nobody even knew I was pregnant. It was awful because I lost both my dad to cancer during Covid and my nan during that time. Six weeks after my dad passed, I got pregnant and I'd waited so long and I'd sort of given up hope. Eight years after trying and then to carry twins through Covid and have them, they're just honestly the proudest thing. I burst with pride.” Listen to more episodes of In the Spotlight here.
