Help


from Wikipedia
« »  
After one year at the Old Rep, 18-year-old Willcox had done some extra work at a BBC Pebble Mill TV station.
A month later, director and playwright Tony Bicat was looking for a girl to play the leading role in the BBC " Second City Firsts " play Glitter ( along with Noel Edmonds and Phil Daniels ).
" One day apparently in a peak of despair Tony Bicat went to the wardrobe department in Pebble Mill and out poured his woes and he said: ' I really don't know what to do, we start shooting in two weeks ' and the wardrobe lady said: ' There's a girl in Birmingham you really have to see because she's an oddball and she has brightly coloured hair and she's like no one else we've ever met and she does extra work '.
So Tony Bicat came to the theatre school to see me and he apparently made his mind up there and then that I was this girl.
" And so Willcox got the part of Sue, the girl who sang with the band called Bilbo Baggins and was dreaming of appearing on Top of the Pops.
In the course of the 30-minute play Willcox performed two songs she co-wrote: " Floating Free " ( an acoustic ballad, with Phil Daniels accompanying her on guitar ) and " Dream Maker ".
In the 1981 interview, having learned the play's footage had been wiped, Willcox commented: " It's the best thing they could have done with it, really.
It was the first time I ever sung in public, and I was shaking like a leaf ... and I was so fat!
" It was Glitter, though, that launched Willcox's career: it appeared that Kate Milligan and Maximilian Schell were watching that play.
They offered her a place with the National Theatre in London, where she's got the part of Emma in Tales from the Vienna Woods.
" So I got a phone call the following day saying come down to London and I went down to London with a carrier bag and never went back ", Willcox remembered.
It was at this time that she formed a band, Toyah.
In the National Theatre Willcox was known as " The Animal ", the nickname John Gielgud gave her after she with a girlfriend " discovered you could have a backwards wheelchair race " and she wheeled herself " into John's private parts ".

2.334 seconds.