“The good thing about getting older is that you stop giving a stuff what other people think about you,” Marina Prior says as we set off on a cold winter’s walk through parkland in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Eltham. “While I care deeply about the work, I don’t care if you don’t like it.”
Despite decades in the public eye – first as the star of blockbuster musicals of the 80s and 90s including Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera and then as an annual yuletide favourite on Carols by Candlelight – Prior remains a curiously contradictory figure, both open book and shut case. “I’m not really a dramatic person,” she says as she tightens her navy puffer jacket against the biting wind. “I don’t get stressed or suffer from anxiety.”
At 61, Prior has reason to be relaxed. She recently wrapped up the Australian leg of the Les Misérables Arena Spectacular tour, playing one of the show’s comic villains opposite Little Britain’s Matt Lucas. She’s currently starring in the Tony award-winning musical Kimberly Akimbo, playing the show’s eponymous hero. And there is almost zero chance we won’t be seeing her round out our Christmas Eves on this year’s Carols. “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away.”
The evolution from colourless ingenue to rich character actor can be tracked through the roles Prior has played in Les Mis alone – originally cast as young lover Cosette, she transitioned to the tragic part of Fantine and now plays the grotesque comic foil of Madame Thénardier. It’s tempting to see this as a natural progression, but Prior maintains that “I had to fight for it.”
