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| • | quit - "I stopped smoking on the first day of rehearsals for 'Chicago', I never used to smoke more than five a day anyway, and I stopped for each of my pregnancies, so I suppose I've never been a serious smoker. I have to smoke a cigarette in 'Chicago' and I really enjoy that, but I don't call that smoking, do you?", The Express, Nov. 17, '97 |
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| • | "For Ute Lemper, posing with a cigarette is the most natural thing in the world. She looks like a good smoker. When she exhales, she can produce a neat, thin stream or a wispy cloud to order. But, while her persona, the person in the picture, smokes, Ute does not. 'Oh, I'd love to smoke,' she says. 'I wish I could. But I can't risk harming my voice.' A theatrical singer celebrated for her interpretations of the music of Kurt Weill, she has trained her voice to sound, as she puts it, 'gravelly', and 'destroyed'. In order to sound like a smoker, though, she must not smoke. 'I love the sensation of smoking,' she tells me. 'I love the taste. But I have to pay for it, and the price is too high. But when I have a month free, without concerts, I smoke for a week. And then I take a week to recuperate from it.' We are in a photographer's studio in New York, Lemper's adopted city (she's from Germany). When the last picture has been taken, Ute finds herself with half a cigarette. She draws on it, pauses, and blows the smoke out, without inhaling it. Then she stubs it out. She has an iron will. Later she says, 'I am my own instrument, and I have to take care of it. And that's a pain in the neck. I use my instrument, but I have to feed my instrument with life. So I would love to smoke and I would love to drink and I would love to do all kinds of crazy, naughty things.'", Sunday Telegraph (The Sunday Telegraph Magazine supplement) (UK), Jun. 17, '01 |