Getting into Tina Turner’s voice got her noticed

By Jerry Fink

Monday, Aug. 11, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Michelle Marshall went from welfare to the back of a limo in Hollywood.

Marshall makes her living impersonating Tina Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

She was Winfrey’s voice in the Mike Myers movie “The Love Guru.” She had one line: “You all know I love him. Put your hands together for the Guru Pitkaaaaaaaa.”

“For that, Paramount Pictures flew me to Burbank, picked me up in a limousine like a celebrity and took me to the Warner Bros. lot,” Marshall says. “It only took 30 minutes to do the voice-over, and they were happy about that.”

Then it was back into the limo to catch a flight back to her home base of Las Vegas. She jets all over the world to perform at corporate events and parties and in commercials. She recently was “Fauxprah” at corporate events in Thailand and Korea.

Not bad for a talented tribute artist who struggled to survive as a young single mom raising three sons, two now in college and one poised to join the military.

“I wouldn’t have changed anything,” Marshall says of the hard times. “There’s nothing before your time. It will come to you when it’s time to come to you.

“If anybody told me a small-town country girl like me — who was on welfare and Section 8 ­— would end up doing what I’m doing, I wouldn’t have believed them. But I beat all that. God has helped put me where I am now.”

Struggling was part of the family profile. Her mother was a single parent raising two children and holding down three and four jobs to put food on the table in Macon, Ga.

“I had no aspirations to be in entertainment,” says Marshall, who grew up singing in the Church of God. “The choir would go into nursing homes around Macon and sing for the residents, bring them food baskets.”

In high school she took some drama classes and enrolled in the Junior ROTC — her father and stepfather both were in the military. “I came out a master sergeant.”

She became pregnant in her senior year. “It was devastating for mom and for myself,” Marshall says. “But she really got behind me. She said ‘You’re going to have the baby and you’re going to stay in school and you’re going to get the diploma.’ I had the baby just before I graduated.”

After high school she went on welfare, working but not making enough to get off assistance.

At 19, she got a job as a crossing guard and then landed a job with the Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, where her duties included processing inmates.

“Police work is very stressful and I would go in with a good attitude and I kept everyone laughing,” Marshall says. “I’d say something funny about stuff all the time, and I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess I was mimicking Tina Turner.

“One day some people in the department came up to me and asked if I could come to a party they were having and do the Tina Turner bit.”

She was such a hit that soon she was being invited to other parties, and before long she was earning money on the side as a performer. After seven years as a deputy sheriff, she decided to see how far she could go.

“I had to decide between a steady job and being an entertainer,” she says. “When people called me to do Tina Turner it was usually in the week and I would take off work sometimes to do it, but I couldn’t keep doing it.”

She traded the badge and police uniform in for the Tina Turner costume — miniskirts, high-heeled boots and wild tousled wig — 15 years ago. She worked in a tribute band, then went solo and worked on cruise ships for five years. Over the years, she worked an Oprah impersonation into her act.

“People would tell me how much I looked like her,” Marshall says. Now, she’s working on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “I don’t know anyone who does her.”

Marshall missed an opportunity to meet Winfrey in 2006 when she shot segments of her show at the Celebrity Impersonators Convention at the Imperial Palace.

“I was at the convention all day and then I went home for 30 minutes to change and in comes Oprah and her film crew looking for me,” Marshall says. “I cried for three months.”