Helen George on her latest musical role, the real-life impact of Call the Midwife on the NHS, and smuggling her dog into the theatre
Actress Helen George, bright blonde Trixie Franklin in the enduring BBC Sunday night hit Call the Midwife, has been transformed into brunette Anna Leonowens for her starring role in The King and I, playing at London’s Dominion Theatre until March 2.
“I’d been wanting to do a musical for a while,” says Helen, 39, “but I was waiting for the right one to come along. This is just such a classic musical theatre role.” Though better known for bringing babies into the world on TV, Helen has a musical background: her first job after graduating from the Royal Academy of Music was in the ensemble of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White in 2004. She has since sung at the BBC’s VE Day 75th anniversary commemoration at Buckingham Palace and on the cast album of Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella.
She’s also worked as a backing singer for Sir Elton John.
As for dancing, she took Strictly by storm in 2015 opposite Aljaz Skorjanec – they finished sixth – so she won’t have any trouble with the famous Shall We Dance? climactic song during which Anna and the King dance a sweeping polka.
Being light on her feet is no mean achievement given the dress she has to wear. “I call it the Beast. In the rehearsal room, everybody had to get out of the way. I’d lift up the skirt and drag scripts and tea cups with me as I went. It weighs 10 pounds and it’s uncomfortable, but this was the life of a Victorian woman.”
The role of the strutting, domineering King of Siam will always carry a trace memory of Yul Brynner, who clung to it for 34 years and 4,625 performances on stage, and on film opposite Deborah Kerr. In this production, the part is taken by Broadway star Darren Lee, who has made the role his own since 2016.
The real Anna Leonowens kept a diary of her time in Siam in the 1860s that was later published. Three-quarters of a century later, novelist Margaret Landon used the journal for a heavily fictionalised reimagination of her story, called Anna and the King of Siam. That was instantly snapped up by Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck for the first film adaptation starring Rex Harrison.
Then Rodgers and Hammerstein decided to make it into a musical. A story about Siamese royalty might have seemed unusual for a duo whose shows were all about Americans. But in South Pacific they had tackled the issue of racism. The King and I was also about promoting harmony between cultures.
“It was written in the Fifties about a Victorian woman and yet it still seems so modern,”
