The holiday itself, she says, is not simply about sharing the landscape of Sri Lanka with her children, but also sharing the people. “I remember when I first came to Sri Lanka, I felt – even in the smallest interactions – that there were parts of the people that were very much part of myself. And I thought to myself “Oh, that’s why we are the way we are!’” Danielle considers it inevitable that her children will also experience this connection to Sri Lanka and hopes to nurture that in them through these family visits.

Born in Australia, Danielle lived most of her life in the United States, spent extended time studying languages in Europe and now makes a home with her husband and two children in the UK. “I feel like a dual or triple citizen of the world,” she enthuses. “It’s great to have an affinity with many different cultures, and I think that’s what my children will have as well.”

Family seems to be the topic Danielle keeps returning to, as the Sunday Times catches up with the star late morning on Christmas Eve at ‘Hunter’s End’, the home of Mano Chanmugam and Neomal de Alwis. Here she makes her Colombo base with her family including her parents.

Danielle’s mother Beverly and father Chris  played a key role in her training and in her ascent to childhood stardom as a singer and a TV show host. They moved their family (including Danielle’s brother, Andrew, who has also flown down from abroad for the Sri Lankan Christmas holiday) and careers from Australia to the United States when, at the age of nine, Danielle demonstrated outstanding potential by becoming the youngest winner of an Australian TV talent competition. The key purpose of the move was to present Danielle with better opportunities to hone her talent.

Beverly and Chris still attend every opening show as well as the occasional rehearsal. Chris makes film recordings of the rehearsal while Beverly makes notes. These recordings and notes provide the base for Danielle’s self study. Beverly, a musician herself, also played an important role in Danielle’s training, attending lessons with her and, again, taking “a million notes’’ as the star describes it. Back at home, she would then work through these notes with the younger Danielle, helping her practise.

“I only realized that mothers and daughters have trouble in their relationships once I met my friends’ mothers, as a teenager,” Danielle says. Beverly’s involvement in her training and career, far from complicating their mother-daughter relationship, has helped cement a foundation of trust. “I can go to her for critique or advice, and know that anything that my mum would say to me comes from a place of love,” the star explains, adding that Beverly herself is an “excellent musician” albeit with no desire for the stage.

It is this connection Danielle had with her “wonderful family unit” as a child that inspires her and drives her in her commitment to her own family. She defies the perception that a star with a hectic rehearsal and performance schedule on top of multiple other professional and personal commitments cannot have time to raise her children. “There is always this additional question for women, about balancing careers and families,” she points out. “I get asked if I’m trying to have the cake and eat it too, but you’d never ask that of my husband, for example. I think as women we have a tremendous capacity within us, this huge reserve of energy, of life, of spirit, we bring to everything we have. So I think women should never feel like they have to choose between work and family.”

Dressed in a vividly multicoloured dress, the true star comes alive in the ease with which she keeps a check on her appearance, soothes her toddler, listens to the others gathered around the coffee table, shares her opinions and remembers to keep sipping warm milky tea in order to not let her throat dry out.

“I think that optics are really important,” she says, “but I also think that being genuine is really important. As an artist you have to be yourself because you are the canvas, that’s where your colour palette is – for every role, for every song. The smallest song, from ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ which I’m singing for my baby – that’s me who’s singing it. You need to be true to this palette, because if on top of everything you have to hide yourself – ugh, it’s just too tiring. It would be very tiresome and just exhausting!”

Being a star, mother, patron of the arts (her husband, Gus Christie is the Executive Chair of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival), activist and educator (and this is not the end of the list of hats she wears), has always been the dream package for the diva. “Even when I was a teenager doing a TV show in L.A., it was always this thread of wanting to be an opera singer who does this, this, this, and this, you know?” she says, matter of fact. “It’s not like I became an opera singer and then decided ‘OK let me pack all these other things in too…’”.

Danielle’s Christmas holiday comes after a grueling fall/winter performance schedule including three shows in three of London’s best-loved theatres: La Boheme at the Royal Opera House, the first ever “immersive” Handel’s Messiah at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and It’s a Wonderful Life with the English National Opera. “I’m just grateful that I was able to manage this really really hectic schedule and still spend time with my family and remain healthy,” she says.

Just prior, the BBC released Danielle’s (and quite likely modern opera’s) most unique project to date: a film of Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine. “I wanted to make a film that happens to be an opera, not a film of an opera,” she says, pointing out that in an opera on film “you show what the show is like”. The 40-minute one-woman show (originally a play by Jean Cocteau) is among the “holy grail” of female roles for Danielle. As an opera it is a challenge, and as an opera on film, it was a “big leap” for the singer/actor. “No one’s ever done the opera this way. It was all very close-capture, the camera was always on me and only on me,” she says, describing the intensity of the job. “It was a gruelling six days of 10 hours of work a day. We didn’t even know if I’d be able to sing for ten hours each day!” The film was released to critical acclaim over Easter 2022.

Danielle de Niese is billed to perform in Colombo again on Friday, January 6 at Barnes, Jetwing Colombo Seven at 7.30 p.m. The programme for Friday is a smorgasbord of pieces from opera and musical theatre, including “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, a medley of Andrew Lloyd-Webber numbers, Puccini’s O Mio Bambino Caro, “Summertime” by George Gershwin as well as pieces by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Bernstein and Kern.  She will be accompanied on the piano by Dilan Angunawela. Box plan and tickets are available at Jetwing Colombo Seven.

Of Christmases past

Segar’s work at Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh

The true spirit of giving

So much more in Metformin

A passion for eco-friendly goods takes shape online

Letters to the Editor

Appreciations