Don't cry for me, I'm Madonnevita

The story of a hustler who uses people and the media to get to the top is the story of the actress herself

When Madonna brings her idiosyncratic style to London on Thursday for the United Kingdom premiere of Evita, her persona and the hype surrounding it will have an uncanny resonance of the Rainbow Tour which Eva Peron herself made of European capitals in the Forties.

Madonna will even look the part. Unlike most actresses, she will not wish to distance herself from her role on screen.

For the Los Angeles premiere at the weekend she ensured that Forties costume and make-up made her look like the former first lady of Argentina.

In the new film of the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Madonna makes a memorable Peron. The performance may lack emotion, or the power to move. But this is more than compensated for by the panache, worldly- wise cynicism - and by the curious sensation for the audience at yesterday's national press screening that the story of a determined hustler who will use both people and the world's media to get to the top is the story of the actress, as well as that of the woman she is playing.

Madonna even used the old-fashioned method of writing British director Alan Parker a begging letter for the part. Nor did she let an inconvenience, such as becoming pregnant during shooting, put her off. This was a part she was born to play.

Parker himself says: "She is extraordinarily accomplished and has given everything to make this film. I find it hard now to even conceive of anybody playing the part as well as she has done it."

Nor could he have conceived that the most successful female recording artist in the world would take singing lessons in order to ensure that she could manage the Lloyd Webber score.

But she did, just as she stepped in after a year of difficulties to persuade the President of Argentina, Carlos Menem, to allow her to sing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" on the presidential balcony. For this, she secured a private audience with him.

As the two of them were eating pizza and making small talk, Madonna suddenly interjected, New York-style, with: "Let's cut to the chase here. Do we have the balcony or don't we?" President Menem nodded: "You have the balcony."

The Los Angeles premiere saw a typical Madonna performance. Although she can certainly have the pick of any designer in the world, she chose one of her friends, Susan Becker, who is unknown in the fashion world, and who gave her a garish and universally loathed tacky red velvet suit with a giant flower at the waist, feathers and flowers above, spike-heeled shoes which were out of period for the Forties look, all beneath a towering red hat fringed by a black veil.

Eva Peron, a devotee of Christian Dior, would not have approved.

As always with Madonna, the doubt lingers as to whether this was a disastrously inept choice or a calculated move to get onto the world's front pages through sheer audacity - and give a girlfriend a hand up at the same time.

She will be in safer hands in London on Thursday. She has decided to wear a Gianni Versace creation. The designer has promised to make a pastiche of the outfit that Dior actually made for the real Evita. He has offered Madonna a choice of outfits for the London premiere, including a tiger-print frock coat, a sleek, golden silk dress, a grey sheath gown and a pink frock with detachable train.

She will also be wearing a Versace outfit the following night for the Italian premiere in Rome - the frock coat with embroidered collar.

She can afford to flaunt. The early reviews of her performance in the pounds 39m film are good. Variety said: "Madonna gives her all to the title role and pulls it off superbly." The critic, like many of us who have seen the film, also thought that it was "an objet d'art that evokes serious viewer admiration more than passionate excitement". Another critic said: "This is her role: a Material Girl desperately seeking sainthood."

In an interview with USA Weekend magazine, Madonna said she believed that playing the part of Eva Peron had been her destiny. "It was something that only I could do."

She said she had become engrossed in the character while making the film, and described the process as all-consuming. "I had to learn how to tango and study that for several months, and then the physical transformation, defining her physicality with hair styles and brown contacts and false teeth ... No one else could have done it. And I survived. It was like surviving a war."