Jorgie Porter made her name in the Channel Four soap Hollyoaks before trying her hand at reality TV with Dancing on Ice and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.
Now she has returned to her first love and stars in the musical Fame which opens in Manchester this Friday.
We caught up with her and co star Keith Jack, perhaps best known for finishing second in another reality show “Any Dream will do.”
Jorgie is coming home, born at Trafford Hospital, she tells me because of Christmas Day, Hope Hospital was closed, she hails from Eccles.
She started dancing at the age of three, always wanting to be a ballerina, and worshipped the ground that her dancing teacher walked on.It was her who encouraged the interest in dancing which she followed through.
At the age of sixteen, she started to apply to dancing colleges,getting a scholarship in Chester.She lost her Salford accent while there, “the ballet teachers couldn’t understand a word I was saying”.
She got an agent and almost immediately ended up in Hollyoaks, staying for eight years, with a short break and starring as Theresa McQueen.
Jorgie feels that this role on stage is the culmination of all that training that she did in her early years at Dance school, and a thank you to her mum for sticking with her and financing her ballet lessons.
Manchester people are the loudest people and she expects very quickly to known whether they like the show or not.
Her co star Keith hasn’t lost his Edinburgh accent,he got into amateur dramatics at a young age, his dream to be on stage, his break coming on Any D
ream will do and doing musicals and recording ever since.
The original Fame project, of course predates both of them, but his dad watched the original TV series and Keith has seen the movie and the musical.He plays the role of Nick, the serious actor in the production that follows the highs and lows of the final class of New York City’s illustrious High School for the Performing Arts from their first year in 1980 to their graduation in 1984.
Rehearsals have been full on for weeks, learning scripts, learning routines and trying to get a rap pour with the leading lady, has “been crazy but also amazing”
“There is so much heart in the show, so much diversity, so many different stories…you go through three years of these people’s life in two and a half hours and so much unfolds.”
The story of course shows just how hard it is to make it in this industry, it’s even harder now he thinks than it was thirty five years ago when the show was first written.
More and more people want to get into the arts adds Keith,the proliferation of theatres in the region impressed him
Having won 10 stars in Disaster Chef which included eating a crocodile penis and cockroaches, drank animal blended cocktails, got strung high above the trees in a human trap and took part in the most famous trial of them all, Celebrity Cyclone. Manchester’s Palace Theatre shouldn’t hold too many fears meanwhile for Jorgie .
But it’s ten years since she last danced and came to the show with a fair amount of trepidation, but for Jorgie, it was almost like riding a bike.”It all comes back…and while the dance movements are certainly not easy, everyone has been so helpful and amazing.”
As for the future, is it the stage or the TV screen that will draw her back?.She didn’t drop too many hints but I guess that she may have fallen in love with the stage.
Fame opens at the Palace Theatre this Friday Tickets and info
