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Nikki Blonsky: hair she is: musical comedy's new star
Interview, August, 2007 by Brendan Lemon
Fifty years ago, the life story of Nikki Blonsky from Great Neck, New York, would have made a great let's-put-on-a-show musical: A plus-size 17-year-old girl who works at the local ice cream parlor is told that she has landed the lead in a big Hollywood movie--this month's Hairspray--while cameras from Entertainment Tonight capture the scene. "My casting came out of nowhere," admits the ebullient Blonsky, who had already sung the lead--in French--in her high school's production of Bizet's Carmen before landing the role playing the daughter of John Travolta in drag.
Given Blonsky's old-fashioned exuberance, it's only fitting that her movie career is beginning with a musical, one inspired by the 2002 Broadway show based on John Waters's 1988 movie that featured Ricki Lake in the Blonsky role. But while Lake has famously shed her excess, Blonsky is proud of her own figure. "I got a little extra junk in my trunk," she says. "I'm not a twig." Blonsky adds that her Hairspray character, Tracy Tumbled, is "not afraid of who she is. She just goes out there and struts her stuff for all the world to see. People love her for that."
Brendan Lemon is a frequent Interview contributor.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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