The ObserverPop and rockZavaroni was in the charts at 11 and died after years of illness aged 35. Her father talks about their family life as a new stage show about her is about to open
There are a few recordings of television interviews with Lena Zavaroni around online. One with Russell Harty where he comments that her eating disorder must save on restaurant bills and another when Terry Wogan tells her to eat up so she can get back to “your chunky self”.
The little girl with the big voice was 10 when she appeared on Opportunity Knocks – television’s predecessor to Britain’s Got Talent and Pop Idol – singing Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me, 11 when it was a hit and 13 when she was diagnosed with anorexia, a barely known illness then called the “slimmer’s disease”. Before she died in 1999 the girl from Rothesay on the Scottish island of Bute had hosted her own TV shows, performed at the White House and shared a stage with Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. She remains the youngest artist ever to have a record in the Top 10 UK albums chart. Lena was huge.
“With hindsight, now, I don’t think I’d let her do it,” says her father Victor Zavaroni, now 82, through whose eyes a new musical about Lena’s life has been written by Bafta and Olivier award-winner Tim Whitnall.
“It was unbelievable, really, in those days,” adds Zavaroni. “In 1974, getting on the telly was a big thing. You’d look at that screen and Lena was there. You felt proud of her: ‘Oh God, is this happening to my wee lassie?’. You never thought ‘what comes next?’. You were in that moment – your daughter was enjoying doing what she loved. You never thought you weren’t going to see her so much. She was just a kiddie and I was young myself.
“We never pushed her, her mum and me. She would just jump up and do her thing. She liked entertaining people. I don’t think Lena liked that Ma! He’s Making Eyes song, but they couldn’t find a song suitable for a kiddie that wasn’t a love song.”
Zavaroni knew nothing about the complexities or workings of showbusiness, he says. “I signed a contract which I couldn’t have understood a word of. I said: ‘Is it OK if I show this to a lawyer?’ And they said: ‘Oh no. There will be no lawyers on the island who will understand this, and if you delay things you might miss out on this great step for your daughter.’
“Lena was nine. She was playing about with her sister on the floor at the time and she just said, ‘That’d be great, Dad.’ So I decided to sign it.” Before the likes of Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse struggled with the pressures of celebrity in the social media era, Lena, catapulted to stardom as a young girl with little control over her own money-making abilities and maturing in the limelight, suffered her own demons.
“I just noticed her getting very thin and took her to the doctor,” says Zavaroni. “I know about anorexia now because I made it my business to, but then? You’d never heard the name. The doctor said: ‘Your daughter has this psychological illness.’
“She was at the Italia Conti [perfoming arts] school then and they were all on diets there. Girls are girls and don’t like to get too fat. We’re all like that – but then it just got extreme. It goes into the mind. Her not eating was a never-ending battle. It’s a very difficult illness for the person, and for the people round about them.
“The only thing Lena ever complained about was her illness. It was a torment to her. She’d say: ‘It’s as if I’m living in a tunnel.’”
Living with clinical depression and anorexia drove Lena, against her family’s wishes, to take the radical step of opting for a lobotomy, a controversial and rarely performed elective operation in which nerve pathways in the brain are severed. Weighing less than four stone, she died of pneumonia a month after the surgery, aged 35.
Erin Armstrong, 26, who plays Lena in the new show, believes not enough lessons have been learned about the problems of celebrity. “We’re talking about things more and we are more aware of issues like anorexia, but has much changed really?”, she says.
“For me there are a lot of similarities with the likes of Amy Winehouse and Caroline Flack – people who needed help in the face of all that media pressure. I had never heard of her [Lena] before but as soon as I looked her up the story was just so striking, so poignant and so many themes are relevant today. It’s a story that needs to be told.”
For Lena writer Whitnall, it’s been a story he has wanted to tell for some time. “I remember going to school the day after Lena appeared on Opportunity Knocks. It was the talk of the school. Suddenly she was everywhere,” he says.
“I genuinely hope a lot of younger people will see the show, because Lena was a poster girl, a pioneer – before Britain’s Got Talent or any of that she was doing that rags-to-riches story with raw talent. Shocking as it was to hear those clips with Lena being patronised over her anorexia, that is a tragedy that hasn’t gone away. Today some 725,000 young people are living with anorexia in the UK and there still isn’t a cure as such.”
For Lena’s dad the memories are bittersweet. “You don’t expect your daughter to die before you,” he says.
“She’s always in my mind. It does feel like a long time ago, but I have always got Lena in my mind.
“It’s marvellous after all these years to have her remembered. I’m proud to have been Lena’s dad and I try to remember the happy times.”
Lena is produced by Anna Murphy, Feather Productions in association with Beacon Arts Centre and is funded by Creative Scotland. It will premiere at the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 16-19 March, before touring in 2023.
In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, the National Eating Disorders Association is on 800-931-2237. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
In the UK, you can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk
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