STILL SINGING
A BRAVE SINGER WAS DETERMINED TO STAR IN HER DREAM ROLE
‘Mouth cancer won’t stop me!’
Maryanne Rushton has many strings to her bow. She’s a dog groomer, figure-skating judge, and a professional film and TV make-up artist, to name just a few of the occupations that keep her busy.
“I know, I know,” she laughs as she lists an impressive collection of her many talents. “I like variety.”
But her major passion is singing and acting in theatrical stage productions.
And the Aucklander – who was a recipient of The Variety Artists Club of New Zealand Scroll of Honour and was classically trained by Dame Sister Mary Leo, the woman behind Dame Kiri Te Kanawa
– is counting her lucky stars that she can still perform after she had to have part of her tongue removed this year.
Maryanne (59) – who is currently preparing to take the stage at the Glen Eden Playhouse Theatre in her dream role as Norma Desmond in New Zealand’s first-ever production of Sunset Boulevard – discovered she had cancer in March.
“I thought I had mouth ulcers, initially,” she says, looking back over the journey that started in January last year.
“I kept buying the appropriate cream and popping it on, and this went on for a year.
“Then one day it felt like a toothache, so I went to the emergency dentist who said she thought there was actually something wrong with my tongue.”
Maryanne had to have four biopsies to see whether a lesion on her tongue was cancerous. She recalls, “It amounted to taking a piece of my tongue out and stitching it back up. It was very painful.”
The biopsy results were inconclusive and Maryanne was offered a number of options for treatment. She took the plunge and decided to have the lesion removed.
“I thought, ‘Nah, I don’t want