Carole Shelley/Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.
The late Carole Shelley, a Tony winner in 1979 for The Elephant Man, played Shiz headmistress Madame Morrible for the first 19 months of Wicked‘s historic run.
“It’s a nicely important role in the story line,” the actress, who died in 2018, told TDF Stages when she reprised the role on Broadway for five months starting in August 2007. “And it was terribly exciting to be in it at the very beginning. It was sometimes a little nerve-racking; it can be difficult to keep up. When they get going with a big show like this, they really expect you to deliver it yesterday.”
Looking back, “I knew that the subject matter was just dynamite,” Shelley said, “but who’d ever think it would go over like this?”
Ironically, it went right over Michelle Yeoh‘s head, the Oscar winner admitting at the film’s L.A. premiere that she “had no idea” what Wicked was when Chu asked her to be in it.
“I knew Wizard of Oz, who doesn’t,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, “but not Wicked, because I hadn’t been going to the theaters and not doing what I love, which is watching musicals, for quite a while.”
And while she was “terrified” about singing in the movie, she studied with a voice coach and, Yeoh said, “the process of exercising, learning to use the muscles in a different way, was actually very, very good for me because it helps with my voice as an actor. So I had fun.”
