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The following interview appeared in The Daily Telegraph (UK) on November 2, 1999.

by Judith Woods

Money? That Don't Impress Me Much

The new face of Revlon is giving me top skincare tip with earnest sales girl enthusiasm. Since signing her $3 million cosmetics deal, Shania Twain has joined the ranks of Madonna, Cindy Crawford and Liz Hurley as a blueprint of modern beauty - and she's keen to spread the news.

"Bag bomb!" she says, as though it were entirely obvious what we should all be using. "It's a sort of petroleum jelly that's used on cows udders to keep them from getting sore when they're milked in the winter. When I've been flying a lot and my skin is really dry, I'll rub it over my face and on my hair and leave it there all day."

This kind of folksy advice is not, perhaps, what one might expect from a woman who has been hired to endorse upmarket cosmetics. But Twain, despite being the biggest selling female singer on the planet for the past two years, clings to what she regards as her down-home ordinariness.

"This business doesn't suit my personality at all," she says, "If I'm treated normally, that's fine. But if someone starts acting like I'm a star, I find it very intimidating and I don't respond.

"It's as a kid that you're most honest with yourself and, back then, my dream was to be a backing singer, not the center of attention. I can't bear to see my picture in magazines. My cheekbones are good and I have a nice smile, but I'm not one of those people who look absolutely gorgeous photographed from any angle.

"I can be beautiful if I have to be, but there's cellulite on my legs - and they're not very long either."

Although she has a massive country and western following in America, in Britain her music has been strictly marketed as mainstream pop and judiciously remixed to play down the country twang. It is estimated that Twain and her notoriously reclusive record producer husband, Robert "Mutt" Lange, who write songs together, have made $60 million from her last two albums alone.

Mutt is based in Switzerland and doesn't appear to get out much. Meanwhile, his wife has been touring the world for the past year and a half and is mobbed in stadiums the length and breadth of North America. I get the feeling she envies him.

As a self-confessed "sensible person" - a non-smoker, teetol vegan - she sets great store by punctuality and hard work (she cites a teenage job in McDonald's as an invaluable lesson in discipline). Indeed, she's so sensible that she is having a scrapbook kept of her career. The idea is that, when the bubble bursts, she can leaf through and enjoy the memories.

"I'll get a great kick out of looking at all the pictures and articles," she says, with such certainty that I find myself wondering if she has marked a date in her diary for this new phase of her life to begin.

Twain is probably best known for her raunchy, feminist anthem That Don't Impress Me Much, With it's robust lyrics, roughly paraphrasable as "men who boast about their flashy cars and great jobs are usually emotional pygmies", the number doesn't go down to well in the sentiment-filled halls of Nashville.

Nor, for that matter, did Twain in the early days: country music diehards were thrown by a singer who came from canada and bared her midriff. One television station was even prompted to run a thunderous item entitled "Shania Twain - Is she too sexy for country?"

But her life provides ample material for a boxed set of tear-jerking ballads. Her father walked out on the family when Shania - then Eilleen - was two, after which her mother married and Ojibwa Indian forester. The family lived in a gold-mining town in Ontario in such poverty that others on the reservation would send them food parcels of moose and beaver meat.

"There was often no food in the house, and I would have no breakfast and nothing to eat at lunchtime," she says.

"I would be at school, just sitting there famished when everyone was opening up their ham sandwiches. It was humiliating - so I made up stories that I had eaten mine already, or forgotten it. I would almost get the sweats when it was lunchtime, so I would go to the music room and play.

From the age of eight, Twain would be woken by her parents late at night to perform country and western classics for $20 a gig. Dressed in hand sewn deerskin outfits, she was smuggled into dingy, smoke filled clubs to belt out the last set of the night. The family needed the money, but her mother was also determined to foster Twain's talent.

"I remember, one evening, we had barely enough gas in the car for my dad to get to work the next day, so he refused to let me go to a club. My mother got me to sneak out of the window and meet her outside and then we drove off. He was pretty angry when we got back."

Twain started writing music and was beginning to pursue a career as a songwriter when her parents were killed in a road accident. Immediately she abandoned her plans and, for five years, took on the role of breadwinner to her two younger brothers and sister, earning enough as a cabaret singer to take out a mortgage on a new family home.

She was in her mid-twenties before she embarked on a recording career. Having changed her name to Shania (pronouced Shan-eye-ah) which means "I'm on my way" in Ojibwa, she recorded her first album in 1993. A blend of bland country numbers penned by other people, it just about broke even. But one of her videos caught the eye of Mutt lange, a South African record producer.

Lange, then 46 and twice divorced, contacted her and a lengthy courtship by telephone followed. They even wrote songs together down the line before meeting, eventually four years ago.

She admits that she had expected an overweight muso with a greying ponytail, and was taken aback to see a "neat looking guy" with curly blonde hair.

Within six months, they were married and had written an album, The Woman In Me, that went on to sell 13 million copies. The difference in their ages - 16 years - looks huge, but Twain insists it doesn't matter.

"Life has been long for me," she says, flatly, steering just this side of self-pity. "I'm 34, but it feels much longer."

Her husband has always maintained a low profile. Even so, it came as a suprise to the press when he was conspicuously absent from pictures of his own wedding that were released to newspapers. I suggest to Twain that his insistence on staying out of the limelight veers towards the obsessive.

"He just doesn't want us to be a celebrity couple," she says, in reasonable tones. "He doesn't want to be in public places with me when I'm being filmed or photographed, and I respect that."

There have been reports recently that Mutt's perfectly natural desire for anonymity has extended to buying up the rights to most of the pictures ever taken of him. Twain is pink-cheeked as she springs to his defence.

"Is that retarded, or what? That would be mad, "she says. "There's this perception that he never leaves the house - some people have said they wonder if he really exists, and there are always rumours that we're getting a divorce.

"But he comes on tour with me two or three weeks at a time, and when were I'm home, we go horse riding and to the movies and do lots of stuff together." Twain has a house in Florida, but lives mostly in an 18th century chateau in Switzerland, where the couple moved - no prizes for guessing - to get greater privacy. It's much bigger than they really need, she apologises, although its seven bedrooms seem modest compared with the lavish lifestyles of the rest of the rock aristocracy.

Their neighbours include Phil Collins, Tina Turner and Sophia Loren, but Twain prefers cross-country riding to socialising. "Horses are a passion in my life. If I had my own way, I would bring home a horse every week."

Not that she does, of course, because she already had seven. Besides, even now, when she can easily afford a string of thoroughbreds, her formative years cast a long shadow. She gives a portion of her concert earnings to local food food depots and a charity that provides meals for children on welfare, and remains uneasy about conspicuous expenditure.

"I'm just not comfortable buying things I don't need," she says, with slight exasperation at herself. "I like Armani and Dolce gabbana, but I'm much more thrilled if I can find something that looks good and doesn't cost much. You know, sometimes I've bought really expensive clothes and they lose their shape and just don't last."

She awaits my shared opprobrium at this shocking waste. When I point out that fashion is supposed to be throwaway, she smiles in self-mockery.

"I'm much too practical," she says, "I used to think anyone who lived in a brick house and didn't have to cut coupons to go to the grocery store was rich. I think, deep down, I always have that anxiety that I might be poor again."

In the next few years, she wants to spend more time at her home on the ranch, writing her music, free of any commercial pressures, she says, and she hopes to start a family. It all sounds so thoroughly low key and worthy, I find myself almost begging her to reveal a reckless streak.

"I'm very responsible," she sighs, "But yes, I do sometimes feel like breaking loose."

And what happens then? An unconscionable shopping frenzy, perhaps? Or a champagne binge? No, in Twain's ordered universe, anarchy is an altogether tamer beast.

"I'd love to, just once, to not show up," she says "I hear about people like Whitney Houston doing it, and I think to myself, why can't I do that?"

Why not, indeed. I have a feeling it might do her more good than she knows.