Ahead of her Sydney concerts, the Broadway legend talks to Limelight about Cats, Carrie and her remarkable career.

As Broadway stars go, they don’t come much more celestial than Betty Buckley these days. With an impressive 47-year track record in musical theatre, and a film and TV career that’s not much shorter, the Tony Award-winning performer (she won in 1983 as the first American Grizabella in Cats) is Sydney-bound to guest in Defying Gravity, an evening celebrating the songwriting talents of another show business legend, her close contemporary, Stephen Schwartz.

^{Buckley in Pippin, 1973}

Buckley’s relationship with the composer and lyricist of shows such as Godspell and Wicked goes back to the very beginning of her career. “I played the role of Catherine in Pippin for two years and eight months”, she tells me over the phone from New York. “It was great. I’d been a huge fan of his from the Godspell days, but I needed to stay in the show all that time to pay for my acting classes and my therapy!”

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, to a mother who was a singer, young Betty Buckley studied dance...