UNLIKE the hairpieces and wigs she makes, Marion Goodrick is a permanent fixture in York Musical Theatre Company. Anything but hair today, gone tomorrow, you might say.

For 43 years now, Marion has been involved in the amateur company, and her services are as in demand as ever for The Slipper And The Rose, the real story of Cinderella, which opens at York Theatre Royal on Tuesday.

Forgive us for revealing her age, but Marion turned 65 on March 21 and will retire this month from Jean Peters’ hair and beauty salon in Lowther Street, York, where she works three days a week.

“But, no, I’m not retiring from York Musical Theatre Company. I’ll tell them when I’ve had enough,” she says.

“I more or less started dabbling with hair for the society from day one, when in those days girls mostly had their own hairpieces, and because I was in the shows and was a professional hairdresser, I got roped in to do more and more – and by the Eighties it was mainly wigs.”

Marion’s original involvement with the company had been as an actress. “But because I was a hairdresser, I didn’t like to see people struggle with their hair, so I would often help.

“The Mikado was when we first acquired dark wigs for the Oriental look, and the little children whose hair wasn’t dark enough for The King And I had to have it dyed. In those days you could get coloured hairspray, dark brown and black.”

Acting was her first love, however.

“I’ve always performed with this society; I’m a life member now. I joined in my 21st year but was 22 when I started on stage with Calamity Jane, when I was in the chorus, here at the Theatre Royal,” says Marion, the first head girl at Ashfield Secondary Modern in her schooldays.

From school, she went straight to a hairdressing apprenticeship at TA Hick and Son, now home to Art Estee in Goodramgate, where she worked for 20 years before joining Peters’ Hairdressers in 1982, that salon subsequently becoming Jean Peters.

Over those years, Marion has combined work and pleasure in her hair-styling, and her many wigs for York Musical Theatre affirm her enjoyment. For Titanic in 2004 she designed 25 wigs that were later hired to companies in Stevenage and Swansea; for The Scarlet Pimpernel, she made 35 “more exotic” wigs in 2008, and now she will surpass that total for Paul Laidlaw’s production of The Slipper And The Rose.

“I’ll be doing about 40 wigs,” says Marion. “Every spare moment is spent preparing, setting and styling the wigs, so nothing else gets done at home for at least 40 nights.”

Marion last appeared in a York Musical Theatre Company show at the Theatre Royal in 2004 in Titanic and continues to sing in the company’s concerts. Come show time, when the big musicals are being staged, she is always to be found backstage. “Any show where hair, wigs and hats are required, I’m heavily involved – and I’m there every night,” she says.

“I then usually have to go home and tidy the wigs up, and I’ve still been awake and working at midnight or even at one in the morning, doing them for the next performance.”

Marion does not create “theatrical proper wigs”. “I do fashion wigs that I adapt to whatever period a show calls for,” she says. “The Slipper And The Rose is set in the 1760s, the powdered wig era, though the producer doesn’t want powdered wigs this time.”

No powder, maybe, but she faces plenty of hard work all the same. “All the ladies are wigged and most of the older men as well, and the prince and his sidekick will have ponytails,” says Marion, whose City and Guilds training prepared her for all manner of hair-dressing challenges.

“Hairpieces were the fashion in the Sixties, so I had to learn what’s called pastiche – how to make a hairpiece… not with real hair but with this horrible, synthetic stuff,” she says.

York Musical Theatre Company is ever grateful for the wig work of Marion Goodrick, one of the “unsung heroes who is essential to a company like ours,” according to appreciative chairman Jim Welsman.

“I remember getting a certificate from the cast after The Scarlet Pimpernel,” says Marion. “It was something like ‘For The Support Of Endangered Species’, as it’s always a standing joke that most wigs look like dead rats or dead cats. It’s that thing of ‘Give it a saucer of milk and it’ll be all right in the morning’.”

Instead, it takes Marion’s midnight skills to have the same effect.

• York Musical Theatre Company presents The Slipper And The Rose, York Theatre Royal, Tuesday to Saturday, 7.30pm plus Friday and Saturday matinees at 2.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk