Does the star of one of the biggest films of all time still have to fight for roles? She does if she’s 45, says Idina Menzel

Idina Menzel will always remember performing Let it Go at the Oscars in 2014 – but not for the reasons you might expect. The anthem from Frozen, for which Menzel voiced the lead character Elsa, won the award for best original song that night and went on to imprint itself on the memory of even the 10 people left in the world who haven’t yet seen the film.

Menzel, a veteran of Broadway who will reprise the role of Elsa for the sequel (of which more later) says that at the height of the hysteria surrounding the Disney animation, she felt as if she was leading a double life. “It was such a strange dichotomy,” she tells me on a hot Friday evening in late July. “There was this thing of having worked so hard my whole life and finally having this huge song. To be at the Oscars, and to have all the glamour of that…”

She pauses for a moment. “And then to come home and have to go to mediation with my ex, figuring out which days he was visiting our son and where we were going, and the sadness, and the regret. It was…”