GRACIE FIELDS
I’m trying to think of someone who is as famous today as Gracie Fields was back in the 1930s – and I can’t think of anyone, not a British star anyway. But back then, before the second world war, there was no bigger female entertainer or one more highly paid. Not bad for the lassie from Lancashire.
Actress, singer and comedienne, star of the theatre and the music hall, Grace Stansfield was born above her grandmother’s fish and chip shop in Rochdale, Lancashire on the 9th January 1898.
Known affectionately as Our Gracie, she was a huge star in a time when there was much poverty. If people had sixpence to spare, they went to the cinema to see Gracie, to be cheered and uplifted, and to forget their troubles for a couple of hours and dream.
Audiences flocked to see her in films such as Shipyard Sally and Sing as We Go! She was one of the top ten film stars in the 1930s and in 1937, was the highest paid film star in the world.
Married three times, she never had children of her own. In 1933, she opened an orphanage at Peacehaven in Sussex in the house she had originally bought for her parents. The Theatrical Ladies Guild needed somewhere for the children of actors and actresses who had either died or were ill and temporarily unable to provide for them, and Gracie obliged. She raised huge sums for charity over the years and contributed much to wartime morale – although that became difficult when Italy entered the war.
Her second husband, film director Monty Banks, was Italian and had they remained in the UK, would have been interned. They went to America to raise money for war bonds, but many branded Gracie a traitor. However, it didn’t stop her from doing her bit.
While still recovering from ovarian cancer, she toured to support British and Allied troops in WW2, and they loved her for it. Such was her popularity that Hitler declared her an enemy of the Third Reich. One German propaganda magazine said: ‘Gracie Fields has earned for England the equivalent of a hundred new Spitfires. She is judged a war industry, and should therefore be treated accordingly.’
Our Gracie had a career that spanned over seventy years and became one of the world’s highest-paid entertainers. She was the first female variety artist to be awarded the CBE and became Dame Gracie Fields shortly before her death in September 1979.