Wicked star Cynthia Erivo remembers very clearly the last time she spoke to her father.
She was 16 and standing on a London Underground platform, when he told her he never wanted to see her again.
Her response was visceral – tears welled up and in her blurry-eyed distress she walked towards a train that was travelling in the wrong direction for her journey.
Then, just for a moment, there he was again, walking towards her and her hopes lifted. But, as she describes in her new memoir Simply More, the man who is her biological father walked on by. ‘He was in front of me,’ she writes.
‘Walking straight in my direction. I held my breath. Maybe he was going to apologise. Maybe this argument would just disappear…
‘Before my cascading scenarios could solidify into hope, he passed right beside me. He made no eye contact, said nothing.
‘I was nothing. A void, an empty space. From that moment forward, to him, I had ceased to exist.’
Now 38, Erivo’s description of that desolate moment is far removed from events unfolding on her whistlestop tour around the globe promoting the hit movie Wicked: For Good this past month.
Wicked star Cynthia Erivo writes about being abandoned by her father at a London Underground tube platform when she was 16 in her new memoir Simply More
The 5ft 1in star with the powerhouse voice, the septum piercing and the killer nails is – along with co-star Ariana Grande – arguably the woman of the hour, after thrilling audiences with her performance as Elphaba, the green witch who (spoiler alert) isn’t really Wicked at all.
The film has delivered a gravity-defying display at the box office, racking up £170million in worldwide ticket sales in its opening weekend (last year’s first instalment took £85million on its opening).
But what those watching the magical tale’s conclusion unfold might not realise is quite how much the leading lady’s performance has been influenced by her own upbringing.Â
For just as Elphaba’s story is shaped by fatherhood – the relationship with the man who resents her because of the colour of her skin and the tantalising backstory that her actual father is, in fact, the Wizard of Oz – so too has been Erivo’s.
The star, who grew up in Stockwell, south London, documents her scant knowledge of her Nigerian-born father in a chapter headed, What I Know And Don’t Know. ‘Fun facts about my father,’ she writes, going on to say she doesn’t know how old he is, his job, his parents’ name, his favourite colour – but does know that he can whistle, ‘always wore a leather bomber jacket’ and, ‘by some strange stroke of irony’, that ‘he can sing’. She notes that it’s from him she inherited the gap between her two front teeth.
She doesn’t name him, nor does his name appear on her birth certificate or alongside her mother Edith’s in electoral roll records for the flat in which Erivo and her younger sister Stephanie spent their early years.
‘I really don’t know much about him at all,’ she writes, as she goes on to describe that Tube station encounter. ‘When he told me he didn’t want to be in our lives any more, I stood there in shock,’ she says. ‘My head was empty. No thoughts, just confusion and quiet. And then I walked away.
‘The first step felt like running into a brick wall of pain. Then agony. My emotions opened like floodgates. I cried so hard I could barely breathe, could barely see…’
The singer and actress was on a whistlestop tour around the globe promoting the hit movie Wicked: For Good this past month (pictured with co-star Ariana Grande, right)
It was clearly a seismic moment for any 16-year-old and just how much it weighed on her is clear.
She reflected on the parallels between her green alter ego on screen and her own life in a recent radio interview. ‘There were so many sort of real parallels – the relationship with her father, the relationship to being in spaces that don’t really include you,’ she said. ‘The feelings you see in the movie are very real feelings.’
Elphaba, of course, falsely labelled the Wicked Witch, reaches a turning point in which she stops defending herself to a world that has misunderstood her and embraces her own power.
Erivo’s own journey has been empowered by strength drawn from her mother, who faced the hardship of the Biafran War in Nigeria in the late 1960s before coming to the UK aged 24.
Edith intended to do a catering degree but ending up pursuing nursing, studying at night, so she could juggle the demands of being a single parent.
As for Erivo’s dad, he ‘wasn’t necessarily equipped for fatherhood’, notes the star. ‘And so the raising and rearing of myself and my sister fell on my dear mum.
‘Mum, somehow in the midst of my father’s iniquity – being a mostly unhelpful, absentee father – found a way to section off a piece of kindness in her heart. She made space in our lives for him and permitted him the chance to make space in his life for us.’ An opportunity missed, for it was Edith who documented her daughter’s milestones in a baby book, noting when she was 18 months old that her daughter, who ‘hums when she eats’, will grow up to become a singer and a doctor.
Neighbour Edward Harris still lives in the two-storey block of flats where the star grew up.
He tells the Daily Mail: ‘Edith was always happy when talking about Cynthia. She would tell me what a great singer she was and that she was going to be a star one day.
‘I thought it was just her being a proud mum, I never really believed it would come true. But we are all very proud at what Cynthia’s achieved because her early life was very difficult.’
For the singer and actress, however, the memories of what went before linger. She once said she hoped her blossoming career might send her father a message: ‘Look what you gave up.’
Having made her stage debut as a five-year-old in the school nativity play, teenage Erivo joined a local youth theatre group, sang choral classics at her girls Catholic school and – after beginning a degree in musical psychology at the University of East London –landed a place at RADA.
She is now vice president of that institution. But her time there was tough – her account in her memoir of having to sing for someone else (off-stage) while being denied big roles is poignant.
She did see her father again, at a wedding, before her acting career took off then once more at another wedding about three years ago. No words, she says, were exchanged.
Erivo earned rave reviews in London and on Broadway, in stage show The Color Purple as Celie, a poor African American living in the US’s rural south. It landed her a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy. Then she starred in the film Harriet, playing slave turned abolitionist Harriet Tubman, for which she won two Oscar nominations.
But hopes of a reaction dwindled. Her absent father was the subject of her track You’re Not Here, from her first solo album in 2021, penned to help her move on from the pain of abandonment. ‘There is a part of me that wishes I could have my dad in my life. But there’s also a part that’s actually very comfortable because I’ve written this, knowing that he’s not going to be a part of my life at all,’ she said.
Erivo was asked how much she thought about her own life experience while filming Wicked, in a radio interview last week. ‘Oh, I think most of the way through it.’
Describing a scene in which her much-mocked character begins dancing on her own, only to be joined by Grande’s ‘good witch’ Glinda, she details the release she felt. ‘Those tears falling out of my eyes, that was not rehearsed. That was not planned. It just happened,’ she explains.
Despite it all, Erivo says she has reached a place of acceptance.
‘I’m sort of OK with it being exactly what it is. I have no desire to start a relationship. I have no desire to mend a relationship. It doesn’t really occupy my thoughts that much.’
Instead she continues to focus on the person who was present: her mum. At the 2020 Academy Awards Erivo took Edith as her guest and shared a picture of the two on social media. ‘To the mother who raised me with almost nothing, made sure I wanted for nothing, built her own life and made sure I had everything I needed!! This picture is a testament to how far we have come. If you hadn’t have done that, I don’t know if this picture would exist!’
How proud Edith must be as her daughter soars, both on and off screen, again.
And how her father must surely lament his decision to walk away.
