Just One Fairy Tale After Another for Disney’s Belle Paige O’Hara

Paige O’Hara brings one the most beloved fairy tales to life as the voice of Belle in the award-winning animated Disney blockbuster, “Beauty and the Beast.”

And her own life has taken on something of a fairy-tale quality. Just three days after she won the role of Belle, her then-boyfriend Michael Piontek, who plays Raoul in “Phantom of the Opera” at the Ahmanson, proposed to her.

It was, O’Hara says, a case of love at first sight. “We both were involved in a revival of ‘One Touch of Venus,’ the Kurt Weill musical,” O’Hara, 35, says. “We were meeting at a conductor’s apartment to rehearse for a backers’ audition. I met him and he met me and we both knew right then. It was really weird. I had never had that happen to me before. It was quite scary, frankly. We got married a year later.”

Don’t expect O’Hara to break into song in her latest role, in Phil Doran’s new comedy, “A Couple of Guys at the Movies,” which opened Friday at the Tamarind Theatre.

“It is about movie critics and I play the female producer,” she says. “It is another strong person like Belle, only it’s 1992 and (someone) my own age.”

O’Hara, who hails from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began acting when she was 9. “I fell in love with John Cullum,” she recalls. “He came to town in a musical called ‘Mary.’ I was hooked.”

Moving to New York in 1975, O’Hara made her Broadway debut in “Gift of the Magi” and was featured vocalist on two Grammy Award-nominated albums: “Show Boat” and “Of Thee I Sing.”

“Beauty and the Beast” marks the first time O’Hara has done the voice for an animated feature. “I got to try several interpretations, but they (the animators) were very clear on what they wanted. The main scenes they changed of mine were with Gaston. I was really hard on him. But they said, ‘No. She is the heroine. She can’t be a bitch.’ But my instincts were to really let him have it, because he was so obnoxious.”