The Dreamgirls and No1 Ladies... actress battled prejudice and ignorance to play the heroine ofThe Princess and the FrogKevin Maher

When Anika Noni Rose was told in 2006 that she was going to be the first black heroine in the history of Disney animation she was ecstatic. For the 37-year-old actress, singer and Dreamgirls star, the role of Tiana, the cartoon protagonist ofThe Princess and the Frog, was, she says, the dream of a lifetime.

Almost immediately, however, disaster struck. African-American commentators and bloggers reacted with horror to the movie’s proposed storyline — a poor black waitress in pre-civil rights New Orleans must dodge a local voodoo-practising villain and marry a visiting white prince. The Haitian-American fashion designer Shirley Bruno said that she was “shocked” by the very idea, while Washington-based Black Entertainment Television declared the entire project to be “not only offensive and ignorant of history, but highly insensitive as well”. The first black heroine in Disney animation, they warned, would be the public face of a racial travesty.

“There were a lot of untruths floating around at that time,” says Rose today, beaming with the gentle equanimity of a particularly happy Zen Buddhist. In a tiny sleeveless lemon-yellow top and tinier miniskirt, she poses her petite frame and fantastically toned limbs perfectly on the edge of the sofa in a Central London hotel room. She speaks with the serene and smiley positivity of someone who is enlightened about the inner workings of the Universe, or at least on her way. “I didn’t concern myself with all that background trauma because, frankly, people were upset about something they hadn’t even seen yet,” she continues calmly. “But I also knew that the history of animation has not treated people of colour in a positive light. And during it all I felt that once people saw how the movie was actually made, with so much respect and so much love, then their feelings would change.”

And indeed, though the basic story remains, the finishedPrincess and the Frog is far from a corporate race-hate vehicle. Instead, its all-singing heroine Tiana, voiced with Broadway-style finesse by Rose, is a strong-willed feminist who is initially repulsed by the callow arrogance of the visiting prince (Bruno Campos). The latter is racially non-specific, called Naveen, and comes from the exotic kingdom of Maldonia. And, yes, there is an evil voodoo-practising villain called Dr Facilier (Keith David), but he’s a deliciously vivid character, sings the movie’s best tune (Friends on the Other Side), and is no more offensive than, say, Peter O’Toole’s supercilious restaurant critic in Pixar’s Ratatouille.frog

Mostly, however, the film is a family-friendly adventure in the classic Disney mould, while the role of Tiana was ultimately deemed so desirable that heavyweights such as Beyoncé and the Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson allegedly auditioned for it. “I’m sure they did,” Rose says openly. “Everybody did. But it wasn’t something I paid attention to.”

The Princess and the Frog, she says, landed right in the middle of a “visibility bump” for her, thanks to the acclaim she garnered for playing Lorrell Robinson, the singing sensation and lover of Eddie Murphy’s Jimmy Early in Dreamgirls, and for her television role as the smart but diffident Grace Makutsi in The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. She says, incidentally, that although Murphy was extremely private and shy off camera, their scenes together were another ball game. “It was like suddenly being in a Williams sisters final at Wimbledon. You’re hitting the ball at 125 miles an hour, but you know it’s coming back at 150!”

Her career before that, she explains, was a hard-grafting litany of theatre parts and Broadway musicals, during which she moved from San Francisco to New York, barely survived on unemployment cheques, and eventually snagged a Tony award for playing a resilient Southern maid in the musical Caroline, or Change. Despite the obvious struggle she claims that she never once had any doubts. As the daughter of a lawyer growing up in Connecticut, her stage life began, she says, in near mystical circumstances. At 14 she auditioned on a whim for a high-school production of Fame, but once she began her first solo as Coco Hernandez, everything changed. “It was a shocking thing,” she says. “There was silence in the auditorium. Nobody knew that I was such a good singer. But I knew right then that I had to do this for the rest of my life.”

At the moment she lives in New York, with or without a partner (“My private life is private,” she says, still smiling calmly), but nonetheless nurtures long-held singing ambitions. And although she has already recorded three soundtrack albums and is currently composing a modern musical, she is impatient to be recognised as a singer in her own right. “I’d love for someone to say, ‘Hey, we believe in you, let’s make this happen!’ ”

In the meantime, there’s always a movie career to develop. Although, with nothing slated to followThe Princess and the Frog, she says that even that can be tough. “I feel like I’m still climbing there,” she says, with a hint of gloom. “I’m still saying, ‘Hey! Hi! Don’t you want to use me?’ ” She stops, catches the mood on the cusp of negativity, and quickly shrugs herself back into the light, beaming once again. “But I’m very lucky. I’ve found the thing that makes me shake. I’m secure in what I do! And how many people can say that?”

The Princess and the Frog is released on Jan 29