The tumour was discovered when she went to series dancer Karina Smirnoff’s neurological spine surgeon, concerned that a back injury from a car accident would keep her out of her partner Derek Hough’s dance space.

"He said to me, 'What's that lump in your neck?',” she tells the website Zap2It. “I said, 'Oh, it's just a benign nodule that I've been watching for four years'. I didn't want to have surgery for it, but he said, 'That has to go'. They took out half of it, and it turned out to be cancerous. Then they took the second half out on Christmas Eve.”

She also had surgery on her neck to fix some of the complications from her injury. The experience has given the 50-yes, 50!-year-old a new perspective. "I was so frightened of the surgery, I didn't want to even consider that it would be successful,” she admits. “And it was so successful, I proceeded to do everything else on my 'to-do' list that I was afraid of, including doing this show. I figure that if I don't do it now, I'll be too old for it."

Jennifer Grey, don’t talk like that! I predict she’ll coast through the first few rounds on warm public sentiment. Then when competition gets tight, she has a secret weapon, the most inspirational dance move of all: the lift. It can’t just work in the ’80s! It can’t!