After 25 years in the music industry, Kate Ceberano remains the consummate entertainer

KATE Ceberano's reputation for being the life of the party is the foil to a career of bloody hard work.

KATE Ceberano leans towards me and grins like a schoolgirl about to share a mischievous text. Sliding a finger across her smartphone screen, and hardly able to contain her glee, she declares: "I'll show you the photo."

On the screen is an eye-popping image of Ceberano's magnificent bosom, painted with Salvador Dali-like faces with thick, wide-spaced eyelashes. The singer cackles with delight.

She explains that the saucy body art was a postscript to a fashion shoot she did for a women's magazine to promote the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, which she directed and performed in earlier this month. For the official fashion shoot, Ceberano wore a perilously low-cut dress and was painted with a Daliesque moustache. Artist David Bromley, who was also working for the cabaret festival, "painted my boobs while he was at it", she says breezily. She detonates that husky laugh again. "Isn't that a great shot? I just love that."

This is Kate Ceberano the irrepressible party girl who, even at 45, is always up for a lark and a laugh. The pop, jazz and soul diva who Andrew Denton once described as "life-oozing". The same Ceberano who posed nude for the Archibald Prize, dropped out of school before she was 15 and lied about her age so she could go on a television talent quest. Who sang in clubs illegally at 14; the slightly feral granddaughter of nudists turned Buddhists turned Scientologists. The out-there Ceberano.

But behind that raffish rock 'n' roll persona, there is another Ceberano, the shrewd and disciplined artist who, long after her 1980s and 90s peers walked away from the microphone, continues to test herself. Asked why she has had such an enduring career, Ceberano couldn't sound less like a hard-partying celebrity. "I treat my career as a job in the same way you do. I value my job. I feel blessed that I can do what I do for a living," she says during a long, revealing interview in Sydney.

The singer-songwriter has 20 albums under her belt, including the gold and platinum releases Brave, Pash and Blue Box. She has won a Logie, four ARIA and three MO awards. One of the country's most versatile singers, she has tackled everything from jazz, blues and soul to upbeat, chart-topping pop songs such as Bedroom Eyes and Brave.

After 30 years in the music business, the singer with the exotic looks and have-a-go personality is still tilling new ground. She recently recorded her first album for Sony in London and this month she won over Adelaide with her inaugural cabaret festival - it's one of the biggest events of its kind in the world, involving 300 performers, and her program broke box-office records.

On opening nights, many festival directors stick to meet-and-greet duties. Not Ceberano. She made a head-turning entrance on the red carpet in a beaded, shimmering dress that was as tight as a tourniquet, joking that she looked like a mirror ball. In fact, with her 1940s hairdo and diamante hairclips, she was the epitome of old-fashioned glamour. She opened the festival's first concert with the song Pure Imagination, then played back-up singer to the festival's star turn, former Supreme Mary Wilson, at a high-octane afterparty.

In August, Ceberano will take up her first big stage role in 20 years, in a lavish revival of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. She will play Bloody Mary, an opportunistic islander and peddler in a high-profile co-production between Opera Australia and the country's biggest commercial theatre producer, John Frost. She describes Bloody Mary, who speaks pidgin English, has betel-nut-stained teeth and an eye for the main chance, as "pretty wild. She's pretty hideous, actually ... she's the least attractive of all the cast. She has very few redeeming qualities except for one: she adores her daughter and is fiercely protective of her." Bloody Mary is also memorable because she sings two of the show's hatful of showstoppers, Bali Ha'i and Happy Talk.

Still, the role is a far cry from Ceberano's slew of subtly eroticised, overtly glamorous video clips. "It's not bonfire of the vanities, that's for sure," she says, laughing heartily. She worries aloud that her husband, film and TV director Lee Rogers, will start having nightmares in which the spruiker of grass skirts has morphed into his real-life wife.

Regarded as one of the finest musicals of the 20th century, South Pacific is ostensibly about a love affair during World War II but explores a far more sensitive subject: racial prejudice. This revival is to be directed by American Bartlett Sher, whose Broadway production swept the 2008 Tony Awards and played to packed houses in New York for 2 ½ years before touring the US and Britain.

Based on the Pulitzer-winning novel Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, the musical is set on a Pacific island. Nellie (Lisa McCune) is an American nurse working on a US naval base who fancies the French plantation owner Emile (Teddy Tahu Rhodes). But when Nellie learns Emile had mixed-race children with his first wife, an islander, she rejects him. Meanwhile, encouraged by her mother, Bloody Mary's daughter falls for a US serviceman. The soldier infuriates Bloody Mary when he cannot bring himself to marry the woman he loves, fearing this relationship would never be accepted back home.

Ceberano has experienced the tensions that cross-cultural relationships once evoked, as her Hawaiian-born father, Tino, comes from a Filipino family and her mother, Cherie, is white. "So I understand very clearly what the ramifications of mixed marriage were, even in reverse," the singer reflects. If whites sometimes looked on her parents' marriage with disdain, "the Filipinos at that time weren't all that happy with Dad marrying my Mum." Her own marriage is cross-cultural and she says mildly, "It's different now."

How did her mixed racial heritage affect her childhood? Ceberano says her main memory of being different was the dawning realisation, as an adolescent, that many lead musical roles "were off limits to non-white girls". I used to think "there were no roles for me ... I used to hand-pick them, thinking about what I'd be allowed to grow up and do. West Side Story was one, Carmen, the Carmen Jones version [another]."

EVEN when she auditioned for the role of Mary Magdalene in a 1992 production of Jesus Christ Superstar, she was haunted by this fear. She told all-powerful producer Harry M. Miller: "You've got to give me this role because Yvonne Elliman [who played Magdalene in the original British production] was Hawaiian." She says with a rueful chuckle: "This was my rationalisation for him as to why he should give it to me. It wasn't that I needed it or wanted it." She duly landed the role and performed opposite John Farnham. This Superstar soon became a phenomenon; eight planned concerts soon became 80 and and the cast album went platinum four times.

Ceberano is philosophical rather than indignant about the stage's race barriers. "Nothing's going to change the fact that a lot of these musicals were written in the 50s, that's just the way it is." She adds wryly: "But I wouldn't want to see Bloody Mary played by a Westerner with tanning lotion on. That's not going to work!"

Dressed in a dark coat with an elaborate fake-fur collar, she projects a relaxed, unforced glamour. She is as unpretentious as she is effervescent, though this adjective doesn't quite capture the sudden eruptions of energy, the scene-stealing impulsiveness, that seem to come from nowhere. She squeals in disbelief when I remind her she had once been rude about surfers on national TV - her husband is a passionate surfer. (She had said, "You never quite know whether ... they're really at one with the universe or they're just plain stupid.") "Did I say that?" she chortles. "That's hilarious. I was pregnant at the time and that's my excuse, your honour! I didn't know what was coming out of my mouth."

As she talks about her family life and the professional disappointments she has overcome, she can seem like an open book - until it comes to her faith. Like her parents and grandparents, she is a Scientologist, but in this interview she is unwilling to discuss the religion. "I don't want to cross-brand this South Pacific interview with my personal life on that, if that's OK," she says, firmly but politely.

She is keener to talk about her early willingness to play the fame game, without being seduced by it - another reason for her professional longevity. Her mother, Cherie, managed her career for the first 10 years but during this time, Kate refused to call her "Mum" in public. After all, having your mum manage you wasn't very rock 'n' roll: "I was always looked after, I wasn't left completely to my own devices. I just made it seem that way because it's very uncool to have your mum as your manager," she reveals. And while the school dropout line gave her street cred, the reality was different: she did leave school at 14, but her mother engaged tutors so Ceberano could continue her education part time.

Even today, her career continues to be a family affair. Her mum still has input into her career and helps rear her daughter, Gypsy, 8. Rogers has worked on some of her music videos and her stepfather, Ben Balfour, is her tour manager.

"We all live in a big rambling house in Melbourne ... we're a thriving unit," she volunteers. Her mother and stepfather "keep my inner sanctum, my world, preserved enough so that when my manager comes in and says I've got this, this and this lined up, I'm not like a blithering mess whose life is out of control. Basically, they've protected me."

She reveals that her manager, Ralph Carr, had reservations - all of them financial - about her performing in South Pacific, which opens at the Sydney Opera House before transferring to Melbourne. She says Carr is "notoriously aggressive" and protects her "like a trainer for a prize boxer". But with this role, "I had to convince Ralph why I'd want to do South Pacific when clearly I won't be getting paid not a dot near what I could get paid for doing other work. He was saying, 'Why, why do you want to do that?' And I was saying, 'Well, it is a passion. I've dreamed of having a role I could eat up and enjoy and have some time with my family', but he was saying no.

"I said, 'You have to respect that it is a dream, and when an artist has a dream they're not prompted by the money, they're prompted by the experience.' " Her mother weighed in, saying, "We have to go where she's going on this." Cherie, who had four children by the age of 21 - Kate was the youngest - is clearly not a woman to be messed with.

Ceberano and Rogers often travel for work. How do they juggle this with rearing a child? "We don't," she says frankly. "We just make it up as we go along, we're just improvising the whole way. My kid's called Gypsy for a reason. She really actually gets me. She understands that we're not like your average mum and dad, and she cuts us a lot of slack. We keep her at school and keep all the things necessary for her to have a social life of her own and stability, but at the same time she understands it's a creative family."

During South Pacific's Sydney run, the family will relocate from Melbourne and Gypsy will attend a local school. "We decided that's how it has to be because I won't be without her for that long," says Ceberano, with a touch of maternal ferocity.

The mother, singer, songwriter and musicals star has survived and often flourished in a notoriously faddish industry. She attributes this partly to her ability to bounce back from crushing disappointment. "I've made a lot of errors and I've recovered very easily, let's just put it that way. I've had everything happen to me that could possibly happen," she says. She likens the pop music scene to a popular Nintendo game: "It's like Mario Bros - you're constantly defending and fighting off evil."

She gives an example of a lapsed recording deal that "was devastating to me at the time". In the early 1990s, still coming down from the high that was Superstar, she was signed to a big American record label. She moved to New York and spent months writing and recording new songs. Suddenly, the executive who had engaged her fell ill and was replaced by someone more interested in hip-hop than the Norah Jones-style ballads on Ceberano's planned album.

"I'll never forget it," the singer recalls. "It was a showcase gig downtown. I had been planning it for weeks." The new boss walked in and kept her sunglasses on. "It was the middle of the night," Ceberano says witheringly. The boss stayed for two songs and left. Ceberano recalls: "I knew that it was over. All the stock had been printed, produced, everything. The next day the contract was dead. And I died."

Ceberano doesn't do self-pity, at least not for long. Quickly reverting to her jokey persona, she says in a pretend wail: "A little bit of me went, 'What am I going to do now? The world doesn't need another out-of-work flamenco dancer.' It's not the only time it's happened ... Hundreds of CDs sitting there that were never released. A year's worth of work. You've just got to get up and over it."

She is hoping the new album, recorded in Britain, will be out next year. "It's full of original work, which is I feel a blessing," she says. She describes the album as Fleetwood Mac meets Coldplay. "Does that make sense? There's a lot of harmony and lot of acoustic. In fact, all of the record was performed and recorded live with live musicians. It has an anthemic aspect to it."

In an era when iTunes is king, Ceberano sees her relationship with Sony as symbiotic. "This will be our first record together. In a climate where record companies and artists have been somewhat confronted because we've got the internet, which gives artists more control - they don't need the larger companies - we are using each other in the best possible way. They've given me opportunities to make original work and compose my own songs, and in exchange they have my commitment to be part of their label."

These days some of the singer's engagements - such as a recent corporate gig in the Maldives - are under the radar. Others have little to do with music. Ceberano is an ambassador for underwear maker Berlei, and earlier this year she hosted the weight loss show Excess Baggage for Channel 9. After a promising start, it tanked. In contrast, a previous flirtation with the small screen - when she competed on Dancing with the Stars in 2007 - was a triumph. She went up against younger and thinner contestants and took out the grand final. At one point, she danced to a number from West Side Story, acting the role as much as she danced it and singing some of the lyrics herself: the classic triple threat.

The performer has reached a stage in her career when journalists like to call her the "stalwart". "I get a lot of those [labels]," she says, sounding a bit miffed. "What's that recent one I loathed - the veteran. It is difficult. We don't have many of me, so I am a bit, if you will, difficult to describe. First of all, I'm holding an unprecedented position in music today. That is of a female artist over a 25-year career, 20 albums now, having had her own TV show, having been in a multitude of different mediums. I just don't think there is a word to describe me, other than really bloody busy."

South Pacific opens at the Sydney Opera House on August 8, and at Melbourne's Princess Theatre on September 13.