Idina Menzel

Lore & Background

Menzel rose to prominence as a stage actress in 1996, making her Broadway debut as performance artist Maureen Johnson in the rock musical Rent, which earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. In 2003, she originated the role of Elphaba in the musical Wicked on Broadway, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. After leaving the show in 2005, she reprised the role in the musical's original West End production in 2006, becoming the highest-paid actress in West End theatre history. In 2014, Menzel returned to Broadway in the musical If/Then, for which she received a third Tony Award nomination. Menzel began working in film and television in the early 2000s. After reprising her Rent role in the musical's 2005 film adaptation, she had a supporting role in Disney's musical fantasy film Enchanted (2007). She played recurring character Shelby Corcoran on the musical television series Glee from 2010 to 2013. Since 2013, Menzel has voiced Elsa in Disney's Frozen franchise; 'Let It Go', a song she recorded for the first film, peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Menzel has since played supporting roles in the films Uncut Gems (2019), Cinderella (2021), American Murderer (2022), and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023). As a recording artist and songwriter, Menzel has released seven studio albums, including I Stand (2008) and Holiday Wishes (2014); the latter peaked at number six on the Billboard 200, becoming her highest-charting studio album to date.

Reader's Guide

Idina Kim Mentzel was born on May 30, 1971, in Manhattan. She grew up in New Jersey until about age three; her family moved to Syosset, New York, on Long Island. Her parents are Stuart Mentzel, a pajama salesman, and Helene Goldberg, a therapist. She has a younger sister named Cara. Menzel is Jewish and her grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe. She attended J. Irving Baylis Elementary School in Plainview, New York; H. B. Thompson Middle School in Syosset; and Syosset High School. When Menzel was 15 years old, her parents divorced and she began working as a wedding and bar/bat mitzvah singer, a job that she held while a student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drama there in 1992. Idina changed the spelling of her surname to 'Menzel' to better reflect the pronunciation that the Mentzel family had adopted in the United States. She was friends with actor Adam Pascal before they worked together in Rent. In 2017, Irish songwriter Jimmy Walsh who was based in New York City said that in 1992, Menzel had recorded a demo for him of the song 'In Your Eyes', which went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest 1993 for Irish singer Niamh Kavanagh. Menzel was paid $75 for the recording.

Did You Know?

• Menzel's performance of 'Let It Go' did not win the Academy Award; the song itself won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
• The claim that Menzel became the highest-paid actress in West End theatre history is not verifiable as a widely known fact and is disputed.
• Menzel recorded a demo of 'In Your Eyes' in 1992, but the winning performance at the Eurovision Song Contest 1993 was by Niamh Kavanagh, not Menzel.