Bethzienna Williams

Bethzienna, a welsh actress and musician, made a massive impact with her appearances in the 2019 series of The Voice, selected and championed by both Jennifer Hudson and Tom Jones. But that was just the latest highlight of a career that's already taken Bethzienna on some incredible adventures, from movie sets to Buckingham Palace by way of an arts degree. Being from Barry, where they inject singing into your DNA, there was never any question that she would sing. But as for the performance side of it, she owes it to 'The King.' "Going to a Welsh-language school, music is a necessity," she says. "It feels like you're harmonising at the age of five. It's a huge part of our culture. But a distinct memory I have is when I realised the effect music had on me. There was a programme that would discuss artists that had passed away, icons and legends. "I was doing the usual sneaking downstairs at night, as me and my brother always did, and I just stopped in my tracks. I saw this guy performing. He had a guitar and he was swinging from side to side. It was Elvis Presley doing 'Jailhouse Rock.' I was absolutely mesmerised." The next day, Bethzienna started the homework that she was more interested in than the type she got from school. She learned everything there was to learn about Elvis, and from that she progressed to Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and further back to Glenn Miller and Al Jolson. Hardly the pop fodder of her peers, but this was the flowering of the inquiring mind that has guided her ever since. "When I was a child I would only watch this one presenter tell all the nursery rhymes, and it was a programme for deaf children, with sign language," she remembers. "Again, I was obsessed, because it was the way he expressed himself, he had to be overly expressive and tell a story with his face and body,the performance aspect." Gradually, Bethzienna came forward to the music of her contemporaries, devouring music documentaries along the way as she still does. She was steeped in blues and soul, from her mum, and country from her dad. She laughs: "My mum did this thing every week where if I was good in school - usually it was if I attended school, because I hated it - on Friday she'd take me to the supermarket and there'd be these old singles in the sale basket. I was allowed to rummage through them and get two or three." Her taste for the stage was developing by the time she was seven, when she started entering the Eisteddfod festival, doing so every year until she was 16. "At school, the music block was my escapism," she remembers, "School's tough, and kids can be a right pain, so that was my safe place. My music teacher caught me missing maths, and said she wouldn't tell on me if I auditioned for the rock band. So I did, and I never looked back." Still barely in her teens, Beth was spotted at this Eisteddfod performance by a television executive who was staging a Welsh Pop Idol show, called Wow Factor. She finished in the top three, as did future million-seller Duffy. Wow indeed. The acting ambition was also instinctive. "When I was young, my mum said 'What do you want to be when you're older?' and I said 'Everything.' I wanted to work at Tesco on the checkout, be an engineer, a waitress, a doctor. I wanted to embody all of these types of characters. I thought 'I'll just be an actress! I loved and still do, storytelling and entertaining' "I loved black and white musicals, because of their sense of being able to move, act, sing and tell a story. Even now, if I relay something that happened, I have to act it out. I love taking on a character and the idea of, just for a second, being in someone else's shoes. So that was it, I enrolled in my first amateur dramatics group at the age of 7 and joined a local agency." At just 15, she started songwriting in Welsh and released two singles there, doing plenty of television and representing her country with performances in Paris and Berlin. There were also her days of performing with a big jazz band in Bridgend, where she took inspiration from such greats as Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington. At a friend's church, she sang gospel, while digging the great emotive storytellers on record from Otis Redding to Dolly Parton. Bethzienna was part of an amateur dramatics group from early years, then on the books of extras agencies. That led to her first film work, as a body double in the 2009 movie Skellig, starring Tim Roth. She moved to London at 19 and was accepted by two drama schools, choosing Mountview in London, who then offered her a scholarship. What followed was three years that Bethzienna will never forget. She learned every aspect of drama, emerging as a BA with Honours, complete with a showcase event at the Criterion Theatre. She's gone on to put those talents to great use with appearances in Skins, Casualty, Our Girl and Warren. In 2018, she was lauded by The Guardian for her "impressive debut" in Theatre Clwyd's musical The Assassination of Katie Hopkins. As a songwriter, Bethzienna was invited onto one of Chris Difford's prestigious retreats, where she wrote with such vastly experienced British talents as Nik Kershaw, Gary Clark and Mark Nevin. That led, through a friend of Difford's, to Beth's work with the Never Such Innocence charity, which mentors the young with workshops about conflict and the legacy of World War I, via poetry, song and speech. The admirable organization runs a yearly, international cross-curricular competition that allows young people to have their say about war and conflict via the creative arts. "I feel like I'm making a difference with Never Such Innocence, and I see it," she says. "We get to work with all kinds of children, and we write together, practice the song and then record it and submit it into the competition. If they win, they get to perform it at great places. Last year, the winners performed at Buckingham Palace, which was incredible. It's lovely to see the effect that music can have." Singing with Tom Jones on The Voice was, of course, a dear-diary moment. "I'd dreamed my whole life of singing with him," she berams. "Musically it would be him and Dame Shirley Bassey that I've looked up, to because they come from the same area. So when it happened, I was like 'I'm not going to let this slip.' "In the knockout round, I didn't see much of him but after that you see him pretty much every day, and it becomes a friendship. It was weird to think that this man that I'd put on a pedestal, suddenly I was like 'Morning Tom, fancy a coffee?' He's honestly the most down to earth person I've met who has that kind of status." Performing on The Voice to such huge national and international acclaim has reaffirmed to this vivacious young entertainer that her instincts are spot-on. "From going on the show, I have clarity in my artistry and in what makes me unique," says Beth. "For a long time I was thinking, how can I incorporate acting and dancing and music and writing without me being all of these different characters? Now I feel it's all just come together as one." Bethzienna released her debut single 'In Deep' in 2021.