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On the surface at least, Hayley Westenra is every bit the ethereal-voiced cherub the classical-music industry has cast her as.
At her age, fellow soprano Katherine Jenkins had just kicked her cocaine habit and Charlotte Church was back on the alcopops after her break-up.
Meanwhile at 24, Hayley is battling a high heels habit, is addicted to Coronation Street and confesses that the previous evening she had a wild night out with Il Divo.
Wild night? ‘Yes, I had a glass of champagne and didn’t get to bed until midnight,’ she admits guiltily.
Back on song: Classical star Hayley Westenra, looking fit and healthy last week, has told how she dropped to a size zero after seeing an unflattering picture of herself
Even the album that propelled her to success in 2004 – the one that sold 2.8 million copies and became the fastest-selling classical debut of all time, ahead of Church, Pavarotti and her own idol, Andrea Bocelli – is aptly titled Pure.
It was The Mail on Sunday that helped her soar to these heights after picking her out as a little-known schoolgirl and featuring her track Pokarekare Ana on our Classical Legends CD in 2003, alongside Bryn Terfel and The Three Tenors.
Simmering beneath her dewily wholesome image, however, lurks a dark secret. It is a secret Hayley has long struggled to conceal for it is at odds with the carefully constructed sweetie-pie persona upon which her success rests.
Glamorous: Hayley attends the Classical Brit Awards 2006 at The Royal Albert Hall
The seemingly carefree Hayley has suffered what she now calls a breakdown, a downward spiral which culminated in a two-month mission to, as she puts it, ‘self destruct’.
During the first part of this crisis she barely ate, and was obsessed over every calorie. Her weight dropped so dangerously low that even tiny size four clothes (the infamous American size zero) were too baggy for her.
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ShareAs the breakdown worsened and her mood became more depressed, she abandoned her British tour and fled to her parents’ home in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she binged on ice cream for breakfast, barely slept and decided dramatically to abandon her career.
‘I went on a mission to self destruct. It got to the point where I was ready to give up the industry, showbusiness and everything I’d ever wanted. I didn’t want to even go out, let alone perform,’ she admits.
‘I felt very depressed. I also became so obsessed with food that controlling my diet took over whole days. The more weight I lost, the more weight I wanted to lose. I still have a dress I fitted into at that time. When I look at it now, I realise how scarily tiny I really was.’
While Hayley never sought medical help, nor was ever formally diagnosed with depression or an eating disorder, her symptoms were dangerously grave and at her worst, she confesses, she felt ‘scared’ of food.
She is reluctant to put a direct label on her breakdown, but does concede: ‘I was in my own little world, which was a frighteningly dark space. Nothing could drag me out of it.’
When tentative hints about this breakdown were first revealed last week, one worried fan wrote: ‘It sounds like she was anorexic for a while, followed by overweight for a while.’
I put this to Hayley. ‘It could be on the mark,’ she agrees. ‘Fortunately I never got to the point where I was in dire need of help.’
At the slippery start of this breakdown, Hayley spent every spare moment fixated on her diet. She lived on boiled vegetables, raw peppers, almonds, herbal teas and ‘green juices’ – and shrank to a miniscule 7st 5lb.
At 5ft 6in tall, that put her well within the underweight category of the body mass index scale. In fact, according to a professor of nutrition, that weight is exactly the threshold below which body functions begin to cease.
Hayley’s problems came at the peak of a glittering career that had begun at the age of ten when she started busking on the streets of Christchurch.
Hayley with her boyfriend Amaud in New Zealand and (right) pictured in 2007 when her problems began
She cobbled together £250 – enough to record a little homemade record – and distributed 70 copies to friends and family.
One of these friends stumped up £2,700 to produce 1,000 more copies and hand them around record labels including Universal, who offered her a £3 million, five-album deal – having never even met her. By 2007, Pure was the bestselling classical album of the century in the UK.
Westenra was invited to duet with Bocelli, José Carreras and Bryn Terfel; she had already sung for the Queen, Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush, and was asked to perform at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 60th birthday concert the following year, after her world tours.
It was during these tours with her all-male band and a single tour manager that Hayley’s food obsession developed. She saw an unflattering photograph of herself at a magazine photoshoot.
That single photograph triggered her obsession with what she calls her ‘puppy fat’.
‘I looked at myself and thought I was chubby,’ she says nervously. ‘It was just a little snapshot but I was so embarrassed people would see it.’
Hayley made a secret – and ultimately dangerous – pact with herself. She would lose weight and shrink down her already-slim size ten figure.
‘First, you lose a little weight. Then a little more. After a while you start thinking, “Ooh. I like this.” Then it starts becoming an unhealthy obsession,’ says Hayley.
She convinced her parents that she no longer needed to be chaperoned on tour and they returned to Christ¬church to look after Hayley’s younger siblings Sophie, now 21, and Isaac, 18.
With nothing to occupy her attention, she spent lonely days roaming foreign cities alone. ‘I’d have the whole day to myself with nothing to focus on apart from the show that evening,’ she explains. ‘I made it my sole mission each day to find something to eat.
‘I was already health-conscious but I started eating boiled vegetables, a piece of fruit here, a raw pepper there, maybe some almonds.
‘My diet was very weird. I’d walk around health-food shops studying the nutritional values of health-food bars but never ate them. I was already vegetarian but I decided to cut out dairy and sugar altogether too.’
Warning bells rang when she flew home to Christchurch in 2007.
‘My father reached out to hug me at the airport and said, “Oh gosh, Hayley. There’s nothing of you.” It still didn’t hit me, even then.’
She admits that even the smallest clothes in High Street shops were too big for her. She began wearing size four clothes, a recently invented measurement made for women with a roughly 23 inch waist. To put this in perspective, the average eight-year-old’s waist measures 22 inches.
‘I felt proud that I fitted into these tiny sizes,’ she says.
Then it transpired that record label Universal was urging Hayley to swap her preferred ball gowns for a look more akin to what one onlooker described as ‘a Pussycat Doll’.
‘I am not a tarty person and I don’t wear those clothes when I’m out, so I don’t wear them to perform,’ Hayley later said of the feud.
Universal later retaliated publicly. Their spokesperson told a newspaper in 2009: ‘Now she’s turned 21 we’ve encouraged Hayley to think freely about how she presents herself and to be on-message with singers and artists of her own generation.’
Talent: Hayley went from busking on the streets of Christchurch to performing in front of the Queen
Hayley says: ‘The pressure to look the right way has always been there.’ However, she now reflects that her fixation with food spiralled beyond her – or indeed her record label’s – mission to change her appearance.
‘Everything in life was beyond my control, including my ridiculously busy schedule. My diet was the only thing I could control,’ she tells me.
‘I don’t want to call it an eating disorder because many girls go through this. What was unhealthy was that I thought losing weight was the way forward in my career when I should have been working on my music.’
For a short time things changed for the better when Hayley joined Irish all-girl ensemble Celtic Woman on a two-month tour. Her weight gradually crept up and her diet naturally changed.
‘Until that tour, I hadn’t spent time with girls my own age. I started sharing meals with the Celtic Woman girls. After a show, we’d scoff chocolates and gossip on the tour bus.’
But it wasn’t the end of Hayley’s breakdown. After the Celtic Woman tour, her schedule was crammed with concerts across Asia and Europe, a visit to Ghana for Unicef (she is its youngest-ever ambas¬sador), and a gruelling trip to Iraq to launch the Poppy Appeal, all of which left her immune system in tatters.
Towards the end of 2008, she returned to Britain for another tour, but suffered bouts of bronchitis and fled to her dressing room in tears after each performance.
Arnaud Sabard, one of her sound engineers (and now her boyfriend) provided a friendly shoulder to cry on but the people she needed most – her parents – were 11,000 miles away in New Zealand.
‘No one was sure what to do with me,’ she admits. ‘They were a bit like “Oh gosh, she’s in tears.” They all backed off.’
After a disastrous sound check for a show in Manchester, and after learning that two of her close friends had been killed in road accidents in New Zealand, Hayley fled to the family home before Christmas where her two-month ‘self-destruction’ rampage began.
‘I stopped caring about recording and I told my parents that it was all over,’ she says.
‘I’d lie in bed all night but couldn’t sleep. I had to go to the doctor for sleeping tablets. I stopped washing my hair and wearing make-up and lived in an oversized hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. I sat around watching Coronation Street and chat shows.
‘I felt very depressed. And I never wanted to get on stage again.’
Her rigid diet evaporated. Instead, she gorged ice cream for breakfast then spent all day bingeing on chocolate biscuits and McDonald’s. She recalls Christmas Day 2008 bleakly: ‘It was just another day on the calendar. I was still in my own little world. A dark, pretty miserable world.
‘I dragged myself out of the house on New Year’s Eve to a friend’s low-key party but didn’t stay long. I couldn’t connect with anyone.’
Covergirl: Hayley pictured for her 'River of Dreams' album
During this time, an ultimatum lingered in her mind.
Hayley was scheduled to begin another tour with Jonathan Ansell, formerly the tenor with pop opera boy band, G4.
‘My manager kept calling and asking whether I had decided to pull the tour,’ she says. ‘If I’d turned it down, that would have been the end of my career.
'I don’t know where I found the strength but there was this little glimmer of something that made me go. Deep down, I didn’t want to quit.
‘I was lucky that tour went well, otherwise I probably would have fallen back to where I was.’
Two years on, Hayley is adamant that she has now put her breakdown firmly behind her.
She has settled in a flat in Chiswick, West London; has been in a stable relationship with Frenchman Arnaud since 2009; and is excited about the release of her fifth studio album called Paradiso on August 29. She says she now weighs 8st 7lb.
She is also back in her big sister role, worrying about Sophie who has abandoned her law degree to become an actress, and toying with the idea of collaborating with a rock band for her sixth album – ‘Like Mumford and Sons. Ooh, or the Foo Fighters,’ she says.
Is she not worried that her depression will return?
‘I felt depressed,’ she says carefully. ‘But I don’t think I was born with a tendency for depression – it was more pressures of my schedule and loneliness that pushed me in that direction.
‘Things are very different now. Arnaud makes sure I don’t take on too much. I have a personal life outside work. And I’ve re-educated myself about nutrition.’
With that, someone sets down a plate of scrambled egg and wholemeal toast. It’s 11am. She hasn’t eaten all day.
She nibbles the corner, pushes a bit of egg around the plate, then bounds out of her seat to try on a ballgown for a photoshoot. Everyone agrees it fits her perfectly.
Half an hour later, I say my goodbyes. ‘I’m running on adrenaline but I’m healthy now,’ she reassures me again. ‘I’ve taken up hardcore pilates classes. I even eat bad things. Like sourdough . . . with butter.
‘I feel fit and healthy and strong.’
She beams goodbye, then picks up her plate again. Her scrambled eggs are cold and untouched.
When she turns, I spot that an enormous crocodile clip is holding her tiny frame into the gaping Ted Baker-designed prom dress.
Small steps, perhaps. But for now, at least the cherub of the classical world has her smile back.
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