The early years - Performer
A moody, tambourine-wielding teenage rock-band lead singer in Japanese attire.
I was born on a clear morning in November… No, not quite SUCH early years! I always had an interest in performance, especially music, as well as in writing, drawing, and history (my first love was Egyptology). Around the age of 12, I started taking performance seriously. I had been a painfully shy, bookish kid until that moment, so this took quite a few family members by surprise. But, luckily, they were on board.
One day, my grandad came home from an errand with a flyer for a local amateur theatre group that was open to children. I couldn’t believe my luck! My parents signed me up and the rest, as they say, is history.
The group specialised in putting on parodies of classics. A few months after joining, I’d finished reading and dissecting Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, ready to improvise my own comedy take on them. I’d found my calling!
Information on the Romeo and Juliet parody at the main theatre in my hometown.
Not long after, I discovered Janis Joplin, fell in love, and at the age of 14, I joined a band as the lead singer. We were called “Windstone” and I had never felt more alive.
Me age 14 or 15, looking rather hippy-esque, playing a borrowed electric guitar.
Around the same time, I started to get more and more immersed in the incredibly exciting local theatre scene. My childhood hometown in Italy is the epicentre of a theatrical culture which would look rather avant-garde here in the UK where I live now, but I didn’t really know any different growing up. There were after-school groups, I volunteered with a theatre company transcribing their interviews and got to be one of the voices petitioning a dictatorial reimagining of the Wizard of Oz in Japanese. These were very formative years where I never once memorised a script but just made daring, exciting, truthful theatre. (Also apparently didn’t take any pictures…)
A teenage me already typecast as the nerdy know-it-all in a fantasy musical
I took classes at a local musical theatre school for about a year, until in 2009, I moved to the UK as part of an exchange programme. I was 16, and felt like a proper grown up. I wanted to move to the UK to learn English and have a chance of getting into the mystical drama schools I’d heard so much about. Once here, I wasted no time joining the local youth theatre, as well as picking Performing Arts as one of my subjects in Sixth Form (where I met my future husband haha), and I joined in or volunteered at every performance-related event I could find.
Wearing actual make up and feeling very fancy, in a really cool show about Northern Soul.
When the time came to apply to University, I decided I wanted to be in London where all the action is, but try an academic degree to keep my options open. After one year of studying Physics and Philosophy, a bizarre and wonderful joint honours, I was surer than ever that, for me, it was performing or nothing. So I dropped out, got a job, and auditioned for as many drama schools as I could afford. Luckily, I got into East 15 Acting School—which will get its own entry!
