A new Paige

This likeable front may well be professionally laid on in the face of the Fourth Estate, but I don't think so. I think she is a strong, passionate, driven woman who doesn't suffer fools at all and has minimal tolerance for time wasters. Frankly, that does it for me.

We meet on a sunny Saturday afternoon, an unusual time for a big star to be sitting in a hotel basement giving an interview. But then Paige has been rehearsing her 20-date tour Mondays to Fridays and doing her live Radio 2 show on Sundays, while packing in a clutch of personal appearances and a veritable barrage of interviews, so there's not much time to spare. The Monday after we meet she is off to Scandanavia to "run the tour in" with a week of preview dates before setting off around the UK. Quite frankly, if the Scottish Parliament is looking for sources of sustainable energy, they could probably light up the Highlands and Islands just by plugging them into Elaine Paige.

She never wanted to be one of the world's premier divas of the musical stage when she was little (OK, so she's not exactly Ute Lemper now, but we are talking when Paige was barely a Paragraph). Little Elaine wanted to be a professional tennis player despite, as she remembers, her then headmistress pointing out that "they'd never see you over the net". But then, she says, "when I was in fourth form I used to hang out with the sixth form and one of the girls bought the cast album of West Side Story. I used to listen to it in the sixth-form prefects' room." Her whole face lights up as she remembers. "I just knew that that was where I wanted to be."

It was her father who suggested she should go to drama school. "He is why I'm here," she says, simply. So we should all thank Elaine Paige's dad for that original, iconic Evita, for the only version of Memory in most people's memories, for the haunting I Know Him So Well that made Chess such a crowd-puller, for her extraordinarily powerful Piaf and even for a year watching a truly indomitable spirit whirl a frock as wide as she was high around the stage of the London Palladium every night and twice on Saturdays.

Paige is unique on the British musical stage, a fact which is not much mentioned. No other name in theatre has created so many iconic roles, has matured and endured quite so successfully. She also has an impressive straight acting CV and is still enthusiastically branching out into performing pastures new.

Talking of which, her radio show, Elaine Paige on Sunday, has been more than just a reason for upwards of two million listeners to turn to Radio 2. "It came along just at the right time ... when I was looking for something new," she says, "and it has really helped me find myself."

That in turn has meant she is finally enjoying the concert platform. Paige still thinks of herself as "an actor who sings", despite having released 20 solo albums, including four multi-platinum and eight consecutive gold. "I really prefer to be in character," she shrugs. But all that airtime tells, and the Real Elaine Paige is happier standing up than she has ever been.

The radio show generated her new album, Essential Musicals. More than 400,000 of her listeners voted for their favourite "essential musical" and - unsurprisingly - it transpired that Paige had starred in a third of the Top 20. It would have been churlish not to produce an album of fresh arrangements of 13 great songs from 13 great musicals. And far be it from Paige to be churlish. "We were going to put 12 tracks on the album, but we recorded 13. We were sure that one of them would obviously be the one to dump. But they all just ... worked."

And they do. More impressively, in an album of 13 great songs from 13 great musicals, there is not one predictable moment. Paige out-sasses Bette Midler and out-cools Natalie Cole. She persuaded her producer to let her "have a go" at vocalese. "It's my impression of Kiri te Kanawa," she says, grinning. She has even wrested Broadway Baby from Elaine Stritch, and made it her own.

Her voice has developed a sexy smoky quality that, I hesitate to suggest, has come with ... er ... time (she is 58). She agrees. I ask if she would rather have this voice, or the voice that sang Memory the first time around. "Oh ...," she murmers, "of course I'd rather have my youthful voice back." But Paige has the art of maturing gracefully. She should teach it. "It is about finding ways to use this new voice," she says. "You have to be careful how you choose songs, keys, lyrics."

Time is why she never tires of revisiting songs such as Memory and Don't Cry For Me Argentina - "Argy Bargy, as I call it," she laughs. "Every time I sing them I can bring something new to them." She twizzles a strand of caramel-and-cream coiffure around her fingers. "You can always bring your own life experiences to a song like Memory." She agreed to go back and record the video of Cats in 1998 after creating Grizabella in 1981, to do exactly that, and enjoyed the experience. Although with "Argy Bargy", she confesses, "sometimes when I am rehearsing it with an orchestra I'll say 'You just play it and I'll join in at the end!'".

There is still much ahead for the Paige career portfolio. She wants one day to play Desiree in A Little Night Music and has been asked to take on Mama Rose. "It might be the end of me," she giggles. "Anyway, I'm too young to play Mama Rose!" What she is contemplating is revisiting Piaf. "But I have to have a big think about that," she says. Now that Paige is professionally peripatetic, even she admits that touring can be tiring. "I'm only little," she says. But the new mature Elaine is cosseting herself. "I've got myself a little Winnebago. I call it my Mini Winnie. It means that I can lie down, watch DVDs, read and cook while we're travelling," She grins. "OK, I won't exactly be doing much cooking."

After the tour, there might even be a little time in the south of France in her second home which she loves, overlooking the sea, where the air is bright and clean, the food is good and she can relax. Except for her plans to learn French. "I always wanted to learn," she says. "The few meagre phrases I can say I apparently speak with a wonderful accent, and so people hear me and launch into yadayadayadayada ..." And she spreads her hands in a really rather Gallic expression of helplessness.

• Elaine Page plays Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 1 November and the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on 2 November. Her tour of the UK continues until 23 November.

A life in theatre

1978 Still relatively unknown, Paige plays Evita in Andrew Lloyd Webber's soon-to-be hugely successful musical, above. A defining moment, it wins her two awards.

1981 Plays Grizabella in Cats.

1986 Stars in Chess. I Know Him So Well, her duet with Barbara Dickson, is a number one hit.

1993 Premieres Pam Gems's Piaf in the West End.

1995 Receives OBE for services to musical theatre.