“I'm Better In My Skin At 60”

It’s 40 years since a song contest set Tina Cross on a path to stardom. She’s seen it all – reinventions, lasting love and showbiz dramas. Now she’s busier than ever with two new shows – but, as she tells Emma Clifton, some of her most important work these days goes on behind prison walls.

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Forty years ago, Tina Cross became a world-famous-in-New-Zealand kind of celebrity, when she donned a sequin-studded dress and sung a particularly memorable song, Nothing but Dreams, which won the Pacific Song Contest. It was the turning point in a career that, although Tina didn’t realise it at the time, would span several decades. Longevity in any career is a tall order, let alone in an industry as volatile as entertainment. But, at 60, Tina is still working, still singing, still a name so recognisable she has the most simple, perfect personalised number plate on the giant white SUV parked outside her North Shore home: Tina X.

Hanging on to her passion and love for entertaining is the secret to making a career like hers last, Tina says. “Singing is something that a lot of people want to do in their spare time. They wouldn’t even consider it a proper job. The other thing is reinvention: the older you get in the industry, change is inevitable – change within yourself, change with how you do things, why you do things.”

The musical life of Tina Cross has spun through many incarnations.

She was a TV regular from the age of 16 after auditioning for shows like Opportunity Knocks with Ray Columbus and snapping up a contract with TVNZ soon after. And then came the Pacific Song Contest, a sliding doors moment where she was asked to sing Carl Doy’s beautiful song after Ray Woolf had to drop out at the last minute. “There were only two television channels at the time, so everybody watched it,” she laughs.