Meet the Nominees: Billy Elliot‘s Carole Shelley

The London-born actress Carole Shelley already has a place in Tony Award history; in 1979, she won as Best Actress in a Play for her work in The Elephant Man — tying for the top honor with Wings star Constance Cummings. And while her nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for the role of Edna (a.k.a. Grandma) in Billy Elliot, The Musical is her fourth, she shows no sign of being jaded. Indeed, the nomination is just further proof of the veteran actress’ instinct for choosing parts and giving great performances.

“There’s something to be said for a role like this one, that’s very small but just perfect. After a certain age, you don’t want the responsibility of carrying an entire show,” she says. “After I saw the show in London, I came back to America and said to my agent, you have to make sure and get me a meeting with [director] Stephen Daldry. And that meeting was lovely and filled with laughs. We just really hit it off the first time we met. It was on a Friday and they offered me the part that Monday.”

What spoke to her most about the role was Grandma’s encouragement of her grandson’s Billy’s dreams to be a dancer, says Shelley. “My mother was the one who supported my desire to be an actress when I was a young girl,” she says. “People used to accuse her of pushing me, but she didn’t. I would say there was something I wanted to do, and somehow she would contrive to make it happen. The fact that she died right before I opened in The Elephant Man made my winning the Tony bittersweet. I was missing her terribly and I would have loved to have shared that special moment with her.”

Shelley made her Broadway debut as Gwendolyn Pigeon in 1965 in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Could she have imagined back then that she’d still be working on the Great White Way so many years later? “I don’t think at that age one projects into the future in any great detail,” she says. “I think that knowing when to slide into character roles has been a great help to me in my career and accounts for some of my longevity. But even if this is last my part, it’s been an exciting theatrical life.”