Fanously born overher grandmother’s fish and chip shop on Molesworth Street in Rochdale in 1898, Grace Stansfiled as she was known would go onto become one of the stars of stage of screen and would spend a lifetime in show business, including a number of appearances in the West End and 10 appearances on the Royal Variety Show.
Gracie played in The Hippodrome in Rochdale when she was a child, entering a talent competition when she was just seven years old. and won the first prize of ten shillings and sixpence.
She would make one of her first professional performances there.She also sang outside e theatrical boarding house on Rochdale’s Baron Street and it was outside here that she was first noticed by a professional tour manager
At the age of just ten she joined a dance troupe called “Clara Coverdale’s Nine Dainty Dots and wouldleave her Rochdale hoem to tour all over the country
She signed her first proffessional contract in Manchester in 1915 and joined a touring musical revue called Yes I Think So.The following year she featured in It’s A Bargain whiuch opened at Manchester’s Tivoli Theatre and would become its leading lady.This was followed by a role in Mr Tower of London, playing the role of Sally Perkins.After an auspicious start it would run for seven years
She married Archie Pitt in 1923, sixteen years her senior, a comedian and writer who was behind the productions that sje had starred in.By all accounts it was not a happy marriage, they would divorce in 1939 but Tower Of London would give Gracie her London debut in Leicester Square in 1923 and would make her solo London debut at the Coliseum later that same year and would release her first record all in 1923
By the 1930’s Gracie had become the highest paid entertainer in the world,one of her most famous songs, Sally, became the theme for Gracie’s first film, Sally In Our Alley, which was tagged as “Britain’s greatest stage comedienne comes to the screen”.Several more films were made,”Sing as We Go,” “We’re Going to Be Rich,” “Keep Smiling” and “Stage Door Canteen,” all on Gracie’s request in the Uk, including one Queen of Hearts, directed by her future husband, Monty Banks, an ItalianAmerican film director
Another famous song she used to wow her audiences involved England’s favorite windowsill and back-porch plant — “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World” usually brought audiences everywhere to their feet.
In 1937 Gracie returned to Rochdale for what was set to be “the proudest day of [her] life” as she was to receive the freedom of the Borough, waving at the crowds from the Balcony of Rochdale Town Hall with her mother and father.
Gracie was then whisked off to the local fire station where she donned a fireman’s outfit and helmet and went parading through the town dressed as a fire-chief, whilst her Mother, Lillian Aza and Bertha Schofield stopped by 9 Molesworth Street for a photo opportunity.
She would have a close brush with death in 1939, a cervical cancer diagnosis gave her only a 50-50 chance of survival but although fra from well she toured France in late 1939 entertaining the British troops as war began
The war would see a turning point in theBritish audiences, love for her.She married Monty Banks in Santa Monica in March 1940 but with Italy entering the war months later, the couple were advised to leave England, or risk being sent to an internment camp.
She was criticised for hiding out in North America while her home country suffered from the Blitz but the couple raised a quarter of a million pounds in America for wartime charities and she would in the latter part of the war begin once again to entertain the troops
After the war Gracie and Monty would move to Capri,an island in the Bay of Naples.Tragedy would strike though, Monty dying in her arms on the Orient Express as they travelled back to Italy in 1952
Gracie would return to the region several times,In June 1959 Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo & Gardens unveiled a new attraction, a ‘Wall of Fame’, and Gracie was the first celebrity to have her hand and foot prints cast in a cement slab and displayed on the wall arriving with her third husband Boris Alperovici,an inventor of some note and not “a humble odd-job man”, as he was labelled by some in the British media.
She would continue to perform and at the age of 80 made her last visit to her home town,opening the Gracie Fields Theatre and the new shopping centre in the middle of Rochdale and making a surprise appearance at the end of the opening concert singing some of her old favourites.
Her last public appearance would be that November the London Palladium during the climax of that year’s Royal Variety Performance
She contracted pneumonia and died in September 1979, aged 81, at her home in Capri, months earlier having been made a Dame of the British Empire.
