Frozen? I’ll never Let It Go! Why Frozen singer Idina Menzel can’t get THAT song out of her head

It’s past 10pm in Los Angeles and we’re sitting in a TV studio waiting for Idina Menzel to record a live segment for Good Morning Britain, during which Event’s Piers Morgan proceeds to serenade her with a tuneless rendition of Let It Go. The theme song from the 2013 Disney movie Frozen – which took $1.3 billion at the box office – has been streamed on YouTube more than half a billion times, frazzled the nerves of parents the world over and even prompted the Time magazine article headed: ‘Let It Go Stuck in Your Head: How to Get it Out’. It has also turned Menzel, who performed the song as the film’s lead character, Queen Elsa, into a megastar.

The air conditioning in the room is broken, and Morgan’s delivery even more so, but while many a stage diva might have thrown a strop, Menzel doesn’t raise a murmur. Surely though, she must be heartily fed up of the song by now? ‘No, I’m not!’ she insists. ‘You aspire your whole life to have such a huge song, so when it comes, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

She’ll be bringing Let It Go to the UK this month as part of her world tour, and yet despite a stellar career that includes a Tony Award-winning turn as Elphaba in Wicked (on Broadway and in the West End in 2006), 46-year-old

She admits that if she didn’t sing it, ‘people would be a little upset’, yet also cheerfully admits to being a woman ‘who likes to talk about sex’ and who has ‘a foul mouth’ – sentiments not quite in tune with a Disney good girl. ‘I have a really introverted side and a [fierce] side that usually comes out through my music and performing,’ she says. ‘I just have to figure out ways to be true to myself and also not alienate the younger fans.’

Enviably curvy with a dancer’s lithe physique, one wonders if Menzel herself has ever been asked by record producers to sex things up a bit? ‘No, but I would probably love it because it would change my image a little!’ she laughs. Her live shows have seen her give rein to her earthier self – rocking out to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and performing a strangely hypnotic version of Radiohead’s Creep, whose lyrics (‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo’) are at complete odds with the uplifting message of Let It Go.

Menzel’s appeal lies in her powerhouse voice coupled with an endearing vulnerability, which was apparent from her childhood. Growing up in New York with her younger sister Cara and parents Stuart (a pyjama salesman) and Helene (a psychotherapist), she knew by the age of five that she wanted to perform. Yet even early on, her talent separated her from her friends. ‘When you’re young, you don’t want to be ostracised by others, so I didn’t sing in front of everybody because I didn’t want people to push me away.’

By her mid-teens, Menzel was already working as a wedding singer. ‘The worst gig I did was when a guest had a heart attack on the dancefloor,’ she says. ‘My boss made us keep playing, even though the ambulance and stretchers were coming in. But I knew I was good and that I’d move on.’

When she was 15, her parents divorced. ‘I didn’t see it coming at all,’ she says. ‘The image I had of my parents was that they were very happy and just fought occasionally, so when they divorced it took the wind out from under me. It made me feel that nothing is ever what it seems.’

Those feelings resurfaced again three years ago when she went through her own divorce from actor Taye Diggs, whom she met during the Broadway run of Rent. They had been together for 18 years, married for ten and have a son, Walker, now seven.

‘I definitely felt lots of guilt [about the divorce],’ she admits. ‘You want to give your child that perfect family life you have in your head, especially if you come from divorced parents, and you think, I’m never going to do that to my family. But it did happen and I feel a lot of sadness and regret. But [Taye] and I always got along when it came to our son.’

While Menzel was starring in Wicked in 2003, she and Diggs, the African American star of films such as How Stella Got Her Groove Back, received hate mail over their mixed-race relationship – something that shocked Menzel, coming from an inclusive theatre community. Does she feel that with Donald Trump’s ascent to power, those feelings of fear and hatred have bubbled back to the surface in the US? ‘I think it’s uncovered a lot of hidden racism in people,’ she says, ‘but now it’s out there, we can try to confront it and it’s making people want to protest and be active.’

Would she ever sing for Trump? The answer is a chilly ‘No’.

She once sang for President Obama, though, and, perhaps even more terrifyingly, for Barbra Streisand at a tribute concert in New York. ‘Afterwards she just said, “You were good” and then walked away,’ she laughs. ‘I was a little disappointed.’

The easy punchline would be to exhort Menzel to ‘let it go’. It’s not like she would have heard that one before, now would she?