Clementina Lombardi Opens Up About A Star Is Born And Her Overnight Fame

Clementina Lombardi's London apartment is the stuff of Pinterest dreams. Tucked away along a cobbled side road in the city's newly-trendy north east area, there's a distinct lack of doormen, high rise gates or beefy security procedures. Instead, her initials are scratched above a worn and faded buzzer, and she answers both cheerily and instantaneously with a "come on up!" For a woman currently on the receiving end of a media storm, it's a surprisingly modest and relaxed affair. It's also, as I'll soon learn, perfectly in keeping with her general style and attitude.

She's waiting at the top of a single flight of stairs, barefoot and bare-faced, and apologizes immediately for her appearance. "I spend my life in this thick stage makeup, by the time I get off stage I just can't be bothered with anything but a moisturizer," she explains as she presses her palms against her cheeks, stopping just before she reaches the front door. "Wait, isn't that so typical of a woman? To apologize for not wearing makeup. Fuck that, I'm retracting my apology." We start proceedings with a laugh, and she shows me around her small and perfectly decorated apartment, bathed in pastels and littered with unique and sometimes bizarre art pieces that she calls her 'adventure quest relics'. "I like to pick up the weirdest things I can find when I'm traveling," she explains, patting an animal skull - presumably real - that sits perched on the corner of a bookshelf. "They're fun conversation starters and just my way of remembering I really went there. I love to travel, that's the only downside to working in the theater, it keeps you in the same place for such a long stretch of time."

Her love of travel was, perhaps, as a result of her upbringing. An Italian born in Milan, Clementina is the daughter of Luciana Rossi, an opera singer often acclaimed as one of the greatest living voices, and her doting husband, Eduardo Lombardi. "My father was a university professor before he realized he had a choice between retiring to raise his daughters or hiring a nanny, because there was no chance of my mother ever slowing down," Clementina explains, smiling wryly as she points out a photograph of a beautiful couple surrounded by three little girls. She's the youngest of her sisters, and spent the first five years of her life traveling Europe while her mother performed in opera houses all over the continent. "Dad raised us. He home taught my sisters for a few years, though we'd settled in London by the time I had to start school. He was the one to help us with homework, he went to the parent teacher conferences, he cooked and took us shopping for new school uniforms. It was a very progressive set up for those days, you didn't find many fathers raising kids in the 90s while their mother went out to work. But he adored [my mother], he wanted her to have the career she'd always dreamed of, and he didn't want us raised by strangers. He was always very sure about that."

If a passion for travel is a result of her upbringing, then so surely is her ability to command a stage. She tells me the story of her first steps into the realm of theater performances, when she was ten weeks old in the arms of her father, who was starring in a local play at the time and took his newborn along to add a little reality to the scene. "It was a one night special," she laughs, "because I screamed halfway through a really tense scene, and a stage hand had to rush on and whisk me away. They replaced me with a doll. A doll, can you imagine the embarrassment?" Eighteen years later, now a graduate of the prestigious Rose Bruford College that boasts Gary Oldman amongst its alumni, Clementina Lombardi was set to take on the West End. "I had to start from the bottom up," she shrugs as she presses a confusing combination of buttons on a sophisticated machine that she assures me brews a good coffee, "I couldn't skip ahead just because my mother sung at the Royal Opera House. That's not how it works in theatre. If you're good, it doesn't matter if you're homeless or the Queen of Sheba. Because you can't fake it, no amount of clever editing or autotune is going to hold two thousand people in the same room captivated night after night. That can only be done by talent."

Clementina was quickly discovered to have talent. Working her way through the swing of Wicked and Phantom of the Opera, she landed her first leading role playing a young and heartbreakingly devoted Nancy in the UK tour of Oliver! "I still cry every time I hear As Long As He Needs Me," she confesses, "but I cry at one song from every play I've ever starred in. With You from Ghost, You Must Love Me from Evita, Hopelessly Devoted from Grease, there's always one song - I call it my a-ha moment. The song that makes the character click. Acting and singing go hand-in-hand for me, singing is an extension of acting and vice versa, and that's why it made so much sense for me to perform a role like Ally. There's not many mainstream movies that combine the two so effortlessly like that, and for it to be my debut into film felt like fate. It felt like it was meant to be."

On the surface, though, it didn't make sense at all. The role of Ally in A Star Is Born was originally set to be played by an American popstar, with names like Beyonce and Lady Gaga attached before both fell through. Set to release on October 5, the fourth iteration of the tragi-musical love story follows the first version from 1937, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, followed by Judy Garland and James Mason in 1954 and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in 1976. Clementina thinks of it less as a remake and more of a "love story to the previous versions". Directed by Cooper, in his debut, the film is remarkably assured, deeply engaging, and works on several levels: as a romance, a drama, a musical, and something else entirely, almost as if you're watching something live, or documentary footage of a good old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll concert movie. "I wanted to tell a love story," says Cooper, "and to me there's no better way than through music. With music, it's impossible to hide. Every fiber of your body becomes alive when you sing." As Sean Penn said, after seeing the film more than once, "It's the best, most important commercial film I've seen in so many years," and he described the stars as "miracles." Cooper and Lombardi, and the film itself, are likely to be nominated for all manner of awards.

Cooper is a revelation, having utterly transformed himself into a booze-and-pills-besotted rock star: He learned how to play guitar, worked with a vocal coach and a piano teacher for a year and a half, and wrote three of the songs. "All because of Clementina," he says. "She really gave me the confidence." His singing is astonishingly good. But what really makes this film sing, as it were, is the impeccable chemistry between the two stars, particularly their early scenes of meeting cute and falling in love, which are some of the most touchingly real and tender moments between two actors I've ever seen. When I tell Clementina this, she smiles as if she knows a secret that the rest of the world have missed out on: "It's authentic because it's real," she confesses, as if she's letting me in on something deeply personal and private.

We move onto the balcony, which overlooks another quaint side street lined with Instagram-worthy floral hanging baskets, and Clementina brings a mason jar of biscotti to join our coffees on the small outdoor table. She tells me the story of when she first met Cooper in mid-2016, when he'd recently signed on to make A Star Is Born and was in the early stages of figuring out who could play Ally to his Jackson Maine. On a vacation to London, Cooper happened to book a West End show earning rave reviews - Sunset Boulevard, playing at London Coliseum - where he saw Clementina sing the role of Betty in a night that would eventually shape history. "She had her hair curled," says Cooper, "and she sang with such power and I was just... captivated. It shot like a diamond through my brain. I loved the way she moved, the sound of her voice." He used the strength of his name to get backstage so he could meet Clementina, who recalls that she'd seen him in American Sniper just a few weeks before the fated meeting. "The second that I saw him," says Clementina, "I felt like I'd known him my whole life. Which was ridiculous, he was this Hollywood actor and what was I? Successful in my own right, sure. Known in the world of theater, definitely. But beyond that, nobody knew who I was. Before he saw me, Bradley didn't know who I was either."

Of their first meeting, Cooper has said: "She came out of her dressing room and I saw her eyes, and honestly, it clicked and I went, Wow." He pretty much offered her the part on the spot. "She asked me if I was hungry, and I told her I was starving, so we went to her favourite lobster restaurant on the way back to her apartment. We ate lobster rolls and drank champagne. I told her about the movie over dinner, and I told her I wanted to try singing with her - she looked at me like I'd just grown another head. But I said 'it's only going to work if we can sing together.' And she said, 'Well, what song?' And I said, 'I Knew You Were Waiting', and she laughed at me. She laughed all the way back to her apartment, right up until she sat down at the piano and started to sing." When I ask Clementina about his choice of song, she laughs once again. "I love George Michael and Aretha Franklin, it just tickled me that he chose such a legendary duet, but that's so like him. We started to sing, and that's when I realized - he sings from his gut, and I knew instantly that he could play a rock star. I felt like every one of my nerve endings was on fire, trembling with excitement, because I knew the film could be something special. We sung it the first time, and then again, and then the third time we filmed it. That was what he showed to Warner Brothers. That was what got the movie green-lit."

Clementina describes the filming experience itself as "terrifying and exhilarating". Her first time behind a camera instead of in front of a live audience, she hadn't filmed so much as a television commercial before Cooper directed her. "In a way it was nice," she explains, "because it was his first time at directing, and my first time at acting. We supported one another through the process, and when everything became too much, we reminded one another to breathe. We fell into this sync, he'd freak out and I'd steady him again, and then it was my turn and he'd be the rock. It was this partnership unlike anything I've ever had before, I've worked with some incredible actors but Bradley is so incredibly giving both off and on screen. He believed in me." This belief turned out to be vital after Clementina discovered that producers at Warner Brothers expressed concerns that she was "too polished" after visiting the set early on in the filming process. "What they wanted to see was something faithful to the character of Ally," she explained, "who was this born and bred California girl, a waitress, with a really untamed and unharnessed talent. I was coming from a classically trained stage background, where everything was note-perfect and precise. It took me a while to shake that off, I had to lose part of myself to let Ally in, but Bradley never faltered in his belief that I'd get there. And I did. I watch the movie back now and I can't see myself in Ally, Clementina completely disappears."

Using her phone and a bluetooth speaker, Clementina plays me the movie's final track, a hauntingly beautiful and sad love song called I'll Never Love Again, and we both have tears in our eyes by the time the song is over. "I cry at everything. I think that's part of being an actress, you have to possess these ridiculously high emotions. You're like a cup constantly on the verge of overflowing - it makes for a good stage performance," she laughs, explaining that I'll Never Love Again is just one of twelve songs she helped write for the soundtrack. She is listed as both a writer and a producer in the soundtrack's liner notes, due to be released the same day as the film, and her name is among a host of industry big names - Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt and Lukas Nelson among them. "Music comes just as naturally as acting to me. It's so exciting to have my name in those credits but during the filming process it just made sense, I felt like I had become Ally, this songwriter trapped in her own skin. I had so much I wanted to say for her, because of her. I've been her before, I've lived her life, I've felt too ugly and too unworthy, our stories really aren't that dissimilar when you strip everything else away."

She is, of course, referencing the extreme and overnight rise to fame that both Clementina and Ally experienced. Paparazzi photographs first surfaced of Clementina in 2016, when her casting was announced, but it wasn't until recently that the public really started to show an interest. "My stage doors have been unlike anything I've experienced before," she says quietly, as if this is a matter of concern and not celebration. She is currently coming to the end of a run of Heathers: The Musical in London, where she is due to wrap any day and embark on the press tour for A Star Is Born. A strong contender for almost every award show going, Clementina is bound to be a permanent fixture in news headlines all the way through to 2019. "It's overwhelming," she admits, "but when Bradley's with me, I feel like I can do anything. He's so reassuring, and he's already a titan of this industry. He makes life a little sweeter. He's the creamer in my coffee." The Jackson to her Ally, I suggest. "Yeah," she affirms with a nod, "exactly. This is all because of him. That's the real love story."