By Louise Schwartzkoff Nicole Car as Tatyana and Dalibor Jenis as Onegin in Opera Australia's Eugene Onegin in 2014. Photo: Lisa Tomasetti The Australian wowing London Opera singer Nicole Car, pictured in her dressing room, is being touted as Australia's next Joan Sutherland. Photo: Neale Haynes 'Car takes the title role in Opera Australia's Luisa Miller in   February.'
T he Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden is as grand as you would expect. In the auditorium, the audience gazes down at a gilded proscenium arch, from which hangs a crimson curtain edged in gold. Above, the domed ceiling is duck-egg blue, with ornate decoration in more gold.
Enter from the stage door and walk through the back corridors and it feels like an entirely different building. Over the intercom, live strings from the orchestra's Tosca rehearsal are occasionally interrupted by curt instructions: "Cleaners to the stage, please, cleaners to the stage." 
The diva's dressing room is a white- walled space with an upright piano in the corner and a torn, slightly grubby blind over the window. The lightbulbs around the mirrors and a gilded costume crown on a chair are the only hints of showbiz glamour.
If the space is humble, the names on the door are not. Romanian diva Angela Gheorghiu - famous for referring to herself in the third person - is using the room as she prepares to take Tosca's title role. Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek is here for Cavalleria Rusticana. She has been singing at the Royal Opera House for a decade.
The third name on the door is Nicole Car, a 30-year-old singer from the Melbourne suburb of Essendon.
She collapses into giggles when I mention her dressing-room colleagues.
"Yes!" she says, "It is the diva dressing room! There's Gheorghiu, there's Westbroek and there's Car! It's weird but kind of cool."
When it comes to describing Car's Covent Garden debut, "kind of cool" is an understatement. In   October, she stepped onto the famous stage as Carmen's good girl, Micaela. She had one aria, a duet and two scenes. It was enough. "The show-stealing performance came from Nicole Car's Micaela," wrote Fiona Maddocks in a review for The Observer. Theatre website What's on Stage eagerly anticipated her imminent return to the London stage in a larger role in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.
Car never reads reviews during a show but she could tell from the applause that her debut was a success. "The response on opening night is something that I will remember for a very, very long time," she says.
Every young Australian soprano who so much as steps inside a European opera house gets compared to Dame Joan Sutherland.
In Car's case, the people drawing the parallel know what they are talking about. "She has the genuine, real potential to be the most important Australian opera singer since Joan Sutherland," says Lyndon Terracini, Opera Australia's artistic director.
"Her singing ... has a really beautiful velvet quality to it, but at the same time it's bright and resonant."
Car had a comfortable career with Opera Australia before she started performing overseas. She was playing the lead in Onegin at the Sydney Opera House when she met the Royal Opera's director, Kasper Holten.
It was an international co- production and Holten was directing.
Within two days of hearing the young soprano sing, he had called his casting director about finding her a role.
"It was one of those things when you meet someone who you feel is very special," says Holten. "It was clear that this was someone who goes beyond singing well and gives you a sense of personality ... I think she has the makings of a real star."
On this wet London evening, Car is in her dressing room with her eyes closed. Rob the makeup artist dabs her cheeks with foundation and sticks false lashes to her lids. He is transforming her into Tatyana, the country girl who falls for the aloof Eugene Onegin, played in this production by 53-year-old Russian baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Car chats as Rob paints and powders. She is silent only when he smooths lipstick around her mouth.
There is an edge of hoarseness to her voice, especially when she laughs - the result of a winter virus that struck in the second week of Onegin rehearsals. She was terrified she would be too sick to sing on opening night - perhaps the biggest performance of her career. In the three-hour production, she spends about 15 minutes off stage.
"To hold a show like that is a lot of pressure," says Car, "but to do it at the Royal Opera House, which is kind of the dream theatre for any singer, that is a real joy but a huge responsibility. You know that every person in that audience has their favourite Tatyana ... These amazing singers that you idolise your whole life have all sung on this stage."
London audiences are not always gentle with those they deem disappointing. While Car earned a roar of approval at the first night's curtain call, Holten took the stage to a chorus of booing. The production, which pairs the lead singers with dancers to represent their younger selves, has been unpopular in London since its first outing in 2013.
Car has only praise for Holten and his vision, but acknowledges that as a young singer, she is often at the mercy of her superiors.
Once her makeup is done, there will be a string of visitors to her dressing room: the language coach with feedback on her Russian in the previous performance, the repetiteur with notes on the score. "If you're really lucky you'll get a director who'll listen to you," she says, naming Holten as one of the few. "But most of the time you have five people knocking on your door at every break and they are all telling you different things ... It's kind of hard to feel like you have a say over anything.
"It's not the time of the diva. You have to be a good communicator. You have to be a good colleague. You have to be someone people can get along with. Otherwise, there are so many people lining up out the door who can do exactly the same job as you."
As a soprano, increasingly, you also have to be a babe. Many young-artist programs, says Car, will not grant an audition unless singers supply a full- length photograph and their dimensions.
Car is pretty and slim ("I work hard," she says of her body) but her height can be a problem; she is taller than many tenors. There is less pressure on men to look the part, but Car says this is not sexism. "The tenor voice is so rare that companies aren't going to turn away a tenor because he's bigger. But they will turn away a soprano, for sure. Especially a lyric soprano because there are so many of us."
Despite praise from opera's leading directors, Car is only just beginning to feel comfortable expressing opinions in rehearsal. Until recently, she worried that opportunities would dry up if she turned down work, though it is important for young singers to avoid taking on more than their voices can handle.
Car switched to classical music from jazz in her final year of high school after seeing her first opera - a performance of Tosca starring Deborah Riedel. "I was just gobsmacked," she says. "I was sitting right in the back row of the State Theatre in Melbourne and I could hear everything. The orchestra was there and the singers were unamplified. How is that even possible? That they can sing over that many people?"
Three months later she was enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study classical voice.
Her father, a manager with an electricity supplier, begged her to study law. No-one in the family knew anything about opera.
Car says she never thought her voice was special, but she knew she loved singing and found it easy - "which other people didn't seem to".
It was the only thing she wanted to do, whatever risks or sacrifices it might entail.
She talks about failed relationships and friendships that foundered while she was miles away, living out of a suitcase. "You lose a lot of people along the way, because they just can't fathom it: 'I can cancel work for a day to come to your things. How come you can't cancel your work to come to mine?'
"It's impossible to have any semblance of a normal life ... If you choose to have a partner who has a nine-to-five job, that's really hard. If you have a partner who is a singer, that's really hard, because you are constantly working in different places."
This week, Car's partner, Canadian baritone Etienne Dupuis, is in town.
A few hours before the show, he knocks on her dressing-room door and sinks into a chair to read a contract. I ask if it is possible for them to live together.
"It's not possible, really," says Car.
"We get apartments wherever we're working."
"I think we do [live together]," says Dupuis.
"Technically?" asks Car.
"Yes! Yes!"
"Really? We don't have any furniture or anything!"
Whatever the case, they are dreaming of a home. Australia is too remote, though Dupuis will visit when Car takes the title role in Opera Australia's Luisa Miller in   February.
There has been little time to relax together in London; Car has spent every spare moment immersed in Luisa Miller's score.
As their profiles grow, the couple hopes to convince companies to hire them together, though it will be a hard sell in an industry full of feuding ex-lovers. "It's so common that companies are really cautious about hiring anyone who even knows each other," says Car. "Because, you know, it's such an intense period when you meet these people. Sometimes people don't know the difference between an on-stage crush and actually getting on well with someone off stage."
Later in the evening, Car is on stage wearing a red gown and a wig made from human hair, apparently pouring out her soul in Russian: No, not to any other in the world would I have given my heart!
It is decreed on high, It is the will of heaven: I am yours!
The crowd goes wild.
Luisa Miller is at the Sydney Opera House,   February 11-19, and the Arts Centre Melbourne,   May 16-27. Nicole Car also performs in Cosi Fan Tutte at the Sydney Opera House,   July 19-  August 13. Her debut album, The Kiss, is out on   February 5.
In good company There are few people with all the qualities necessary to be a truly great opera singer. So says Opera Australia's artistic director, Lyndon Terracini.
"There was Pavarotti in his generation," he says. "And Joan Sutherland in her repertoire in her time."
This is the company in which Terracini places Nicole Car.
When Car entered Opera Australia's young-artist program, Terracini says she had plenty to learn. "She's concentrated on ensuring [her voice] stays beautiful rather than trying to scream ahead," he says. "She's worked on her acting skills. Back then, she didn't have the sort of figure that she has now. You need a lot more than a good voice and Nicole has it all."
He compares Car to German soprano Anja Harteros, who won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 1999. In Car's generation, he names American tenor Michael Fabiano, who appeared with her in Eugene Onegin in London, as a singer on a similar trajectory.
Car's rise, says Terracini, is rare, "and, I suppose, particularly rare for an Australian singer".