Growing up, both personally and professionally, is doubly difficult when you've lost your childhood to stardom--as the current generation of young stars, Brooke Shields, Tatum O'Neal and Ricky Schroder, are discovering. Over the next few weeks, we look at our favourite child stars of the past who did make it. . .This week, Petula Clark tells Corina Honan why she accepted the most unexpected challenge of her 40-year career.

      "WHERE'S my little fat one?" cries a breathless Pexula Clark, arriving for rehearsals of The Sound of Music. The room is full of cute little kids in leotards trying to outdo each other in the splits and dance routines they've learned the day before. One rather podgy little girl with pigtails seems a bit out of it. But her round face lights up as the star of the show whisks her off her feet and gives her a motherly bear-hug.
      Petula Clark, mother of three children herself, is clearly enjoying every bit of her first-ever role in a major London musical. As she swings into her daily half-hour work-out, she looks as trim and agile as she's ever been. She's 48 now, with a cruelly short haircut framing that strongly-structured face .. . bare of any make-up today. Yet somehow, at the same time, she is also the winsome Maria.
      The part which Julie Andrews will always be remembered for was casually offered to Pet over lunch one day. She turned it down flat.
      "My husband and I had been invited to lunch with the man who owns the Apollo Victoria Theatre on the day I was due to leave England at four p.m. for some concerts in the Middle East," she says. "I thought, funny, maybe he wants me to do a concert for him. He showed me round the dressing-rooms and the whirlpool massage bath. Lovely, very nice. But he still didn't suggest anything.
      "At lunch he suddenly asked: 'How do you feel about doing The Sound of Music?' Straightaway I said: `No. No desire at all!"
      She chuckles as the strains of The hi/IA ore

a/lie.., sung by 18 children, waft in from the rehearsal room.
      "You see, to me The Sound of Music was Julie Andrews," she goes on. We were kid performers together, we grew up together and I adore her. But I've always been so completely different from Julie. She was always very sweet, with a beautiful voice and very nicely behaved. I'd come in and do swing and comedy. So whenever people call me a nice English rose, I always think . . . how strange. I couldn't imagine being like Julie."
      But, incredibly, Pet had never seen Julie Andrews in her film role as Maria. So, almost on a whim, she bought a video of the film on her way to the airport and settled down with her French husband, Claude Wolff, to watch The Sound of Music for the first time in a Bahrain hotel.
      "I sat there in the steaming heat and thought it was enchanting. Next I thought, wait a minute, if they've asked me to be Maria, it must be because they want something different.
      "So I had a meeting with Ross Taylor, who's putting on the show, and said I'd do it if I were allowed to give a different kind of performance. I told him: `You do realise that my voice is very much lower and the songs will sound very different.' Ross replied: `That's what makes it exciting . . . otherwise I probably would have asked Julie herself.'
      For a moment a note of triumph seems to creep into her voice. "I thought Julie gave a lovely performance," she pronounces categorically . . . and then proceeds to pick delicate holes in that performance.
      "I did feel Maria should have a lot more depth to her, I felt the film, all so beautiful, was relying very much on visual beauty and not really getting down to the more earthy problems. Austria was, after all, in a very difficult position at the time the film was set. I see The Sound of Music as something like Frito, which deals with serious events without making the show too serious.

      Clearly, the new Maria will be nothing like the sweet young novice we remember from the film.
      "This Maria's funnier she'll say everything with a bit more humour," says Pet firmly, "She mustn't lose her innocence, of course, but I want to lose a bit of the sentimentality and sweetness. Some of Maria's lines I'll use as written, but I'll be bending them a bit for meaning."
      The final clincher in her decision to create this new Maria was talking to the real one. The real Baroness Maria von Trapp, now 76, and Pet, the latest in a long line to play her, met appropriately enough on the snow-capped mountains near Salzburg. It was all a bit of snazzy pre-show publicity, but for Pet it was also a good opportunity to find out more about the formidable Baroness.
      "Almost the first thing she said to me was: `Please, I beg of you, certainly for the first part of the show, will you please not make Maria goody-goody like all the others. I was not goody- goody. I was wild! In fact the nuns only took me into the convent out of the goodness of their hearts . . they were never going to keep me in.'

      The Baroness, who really was a novice "but more like a wild boy than a young lady", and who really did win the heart of the stern Baron and his seven lonely children, now lives in the USA. Her beloved band died of lung cancer when she was still only 41, but she faced tragedy with the same stoicism that carried her through the loss of country when the Nazis took One senses instinctively that she is a woman after Petula's own heart "I have a feeling," says Pet, "that she was stronger the Baron in the marriage. She's a real character. . .I think she has a kind of steel rod going through her. It doesn't matter what happens, she will always make it--underneath is a basic courage. I think possibly I'm like that too.
      Yet after all that she said, "In the last three years I have hardly worked at all. It's really only in the last year that I have put a small band together and started working again. In this business it's impossible to compromise. It's very fierce: ferocious in fact. I have just been fooling around until now."
      Astonishingly, she seemed brighter and fresher after that final concert at Wimbledon than at any time in the previous four days. Maybe the `flu had gone. Or maybe it was simply because she was enjoying herself, doing what she says she loves and knows best - singing.
      "But she's also a bit of a tyrant. . .over the years, she's become that. She has had a tough life, on the road in the States with the Trapp family singers. But when God closes the door, someone opens the window, That's a line from the musical and I think she really does believe that."
      Curiously, that famous line echoes Pet's own outlook on life. "I've never planned anything . . . it's more exciting that way. And I've never had any ambitions, ever. I just want to get through each day, and to do it properly as well," she says.
      She finds a real sense of satisfaction, she says, in pitching in with her musical entourage to organise lights, sound and even pianos when they're touring in primitive areas. And it's typical that when her team was delayed at Damascus Airport, she started dancing and singing to while the time away. Just the sort of thing, in fact, you'd imagine Maria would have done!
      There's a delightful, warm, fun side to Petula. But there's also the same invisible rod of iron she sensed in the Baroness Maria. Journalists broach the subject of age-and she is, after all, playing a young novice- at their peril, "I don't think about age. Not at all," she says, withering you with a ferocious look. Anything Petula did 20 years ago, she passionately believes she can do even better now, innocent novices included.
     She has grown in confidence and strength over the years, personally and professionally. And she is disarmingly frank about the personal side of her life. Rumours of a rift between herself and Claude, once her record publicity man and now her manager, have undoubtedly caused her pain. But she is philosophical.

      "The rumours came about because we were seen apart a lot . . . and we used to be completely together.
      "There's no question of a rift but we have been married 20 years. It's not a honeymoon any more. I'm able to cope with a lot of things on my own now and my children aren't at home, so I have more time. Sometimes my husband can't be with me. But I don't need him . . . it's very good I can cope on my own.
      If that sounds harsh, Pet does not intend it that way. She may have come into her own professionally now, with the benefit of maturity and years of hard slog behind her. But she also values her family life- so much so that in 1976 she gave up work for three years.
      At that time, she had been living in Switzerland for six years with Claude, her two daughters Barbara, 19, and Katherine, 17, and son Patrick, who's now eight.
      "I was living there," she says ruefully, "but in fact I was mostly working in Las Vegas-that's where my biggest audience is. I just got fed up with `the Las Vegas scene, all spangles and razmataz, and I wanted very much to spend more time with my children, particularly the little one. So I stopped . . . and everybody thought I was crazy. You see it was financially incredible working there-I could make more in a week than in a year elsewhere."
      It was also the first time she had ever stopped the entertainment merry- go-round to get off. Even during pregnancy, she'd worked up until the eighth month and was back at work again within three weeks of giving birth.
      "Stopping work was marvellous at first," she says. "I was taking Patrick to school every day, then bringing him home. We were going out as a family, doing things together. Instead of snatching time at our chalet in France, we'd take long weekends, picking blackberries and raspberries in the mountains. It was like a lovely long holiday.
      "But part of me was still running there was a motor inside me saying: `Something's missing, where is it?' Funnily, it was the children who said to me one day: `Why aren't you working any more? You should be out and doing things.' They'd been used to seeing me always preparing for some show; they were used to a sort of buzz in me."
      This "sort of buzz" was deeply ingrained in her-it had to be, after her upbringing. She had started singing at concerts when she was six, broadcast for the BBC at eight and, by the age of 11, was a film star with a contract of her own. She was brought up in that topsy-turvy showbiz world which expects you to work and behave grown-up when you're 10, then makes you bind your chest and wear ankle-socks at 17.
      She emerged intact from all that, though not without a sad sense of loss for the childhood she had never really had. Perhaps that three-year sabbatical was just what she needed to experience some of those cherished moments ordinary children automatically store in their memory banks. But three years was enough after that everything suddenly came together.

      Kenny Clayton, who'd been Pet's musical director many years before had just ended a job with the French singer Charles Aznavour. "I grabbed him," says Pet. Like her, Kenny wanted to put together a small ensemble of about nine musicians instead of the 40-piece orchestra considered essential in Las Vegas.
      Not only did Petula's missing "buzz" return, but she felt she was performing better than ever before Others thought so, too. From America there was a flow of offers for her to take the leading role in musicals like Irma la Douce, Annie Get Your Gun, Can-can, even My Fair Lady
      "Can you see me in Annie Get Your Gun ?" she says, laughing. I wasn't really tempted by any of the roles. I couldn't bear me in any of them-let's face it, I don't sing like My Fair Lady. The musical I was looking for hasn't been written.
      Most of the last couple of years have been spent touring in England with her band, with a short interlude playing Peter Pan's mother in a film still to be released. Then came The Sound of Music. many ways it was an ideal time I Pet to commit herself to at least six months of a six-nights-a-week musical on the London stage.
      "I do feel more free now, with daughters living in Paris on her own since last summer. And Patrick is at school in Chichester, so I spend every weekend with him, come what may. I don't want him growing with a nanny. . . the girls had rather too much of that.
      "My husband is keeping an eye on the girls, so he's a bit in Paris and a bit in Geneva where he has his busness. He's having the most difficult time, flitting about from one place to another. It's one of those odd times in our lives. Life is like that. . . and it's worth it.

     "Then, after it's all over, I'll start thinking about where I'm going live permanently. I'd love to come back to England and perhaps by the end of the run the girls may have changed their minds about Paris My husband doesn't really mind where we live."
      Even now that Petula's back in top form heading the cast of the world's most famous musical, She doesn't regret those three years took off from work. They gave her much-needed time for reflection a rest, just as The Sound of Music is now giving her a new "buzz" a challenge.
      "Stopping work was something needed to do, to close the door for a while," she says. "As for the musical . . . well, anything new is a bit of a question-mark, isn't it ?"
      The Baroness would certainly have pulled her up there... and said something about doors closing and windows opening!