MADONNA MAKES A MOTHER

 “I’d been wanting to have a child for a really long time, but I wasn’t trying, just put it like that,” Madonna says. “It was one of those weird surprises. I was so engrossed in making the movie that I wasn’t paying attention to my body. I didn’t have any symptoms — any feelings of fatigue or strangeness. I attributed to working too hard.”

“Later I was tired and I’d sometimes feel a bit nauseous, but we were shooting outside and it was 100 degrees [38ºC] every day and everyone was feeling a bit sick. If I said, ‘I kind of feel sick’, the girl doing my make-up would say, ‘I feel sick, too ···· I think the lunch was bad’. And I’d think, ‘ Yeah, lunch must have been bad’. I never, ever thought that I was pregnant, It just didn’t seem like a viable option.”

 Madonna’s pregnancy was later confirmed by her doctor in New York, before the ‘Evita’ cast and crew flew on to Budapest, Hungary, to complete filming. “When I finally did find out, it was kind of like, ‘No way! Really? No! I’m making a movie right now — that’s absurd’,” she recalls, laughing. “But then it was like the greatest thing in the world.”

She also had an ultrasound. “When you take a blood test and they say, ‘You’re pregnant’, you just go, ‘Oh and don’t feel any different really’. But when you see the little baby and it’s …[she indicates a few centimeters between her fingers] then it hits you like a ton of bricks. It’s real. I cried when I heard my baby’s heartbeat. It was the most incredible experience. I fell in love,” she says, her eyes literally shining with emotion.

Even though she and ‘Evita’ director Alan Parker decided to suppress news of her pregnancy for as long as possible to keep all attention focused on the film, Madonna says her condition actually helped her with her portrayal of Eva Peron, who died of cervical cancer in 1952, at the age of 33.

“It did add another layer of tension to filming.” She admits, “ because I’d be worried that I was on my feet too long or working too many hours. I had lot of dancing to do [Eva was a tango aficionado] until I was about four and a half months. There was a lot of jumping and sometimes I fell and I’d think, ‘I’ve done it this time’, and I’d rush to the doctor to make sure everything was okay. I must be built like a tank, because nothing happened.”liuxuepaper.com