9 January: Gracie Fields

Born this date in 1898 was Dame Gracie Fields, singer and comedienne. 10 facts about her:

1. She is best known for her song Sally and the film Sally in our Alley. Her other hits include The Biggest Aspidistra In The World, We're All living at the Cloisters, Sing As We Go and Little Donkey.

2. She was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, above a Fish and chip shop owned by her grandmother.

3. She started performing as a child joining children's repertory theatre groups, and became known as “The Girl with the Double Voice”.

4. On her 18^th birthday, comedian and impresario Archie Pitt, with whom she was working on a touring show, gave her Champagne and wrote in her autograph book that he was going to make her a star. He became her manager and later her first husband.

5. She became famous after appearing in the West End of London, in a show called Mr Tower of London. Her first recording was My Blue Heaven, which sold 500,000 copies in 1928. By 1933, she’d sold four million records. She pressed the 4 millionth record herself.

6. Although she appeared in films, she much preferred appearing before a live audience. She found the film making process tedious. Her voice was such that opera star Luisa Tetrazzini suggested she might become an opera singer, but she declined, preferring to stay in the world she knew and which, she believed, gave more pleasure to her fans.

7. Archie Pitt wasn’t faithful. He had a mistress who even lived with them. They eventually divorced. Gracie donated their house to charity and soon after married again, Italian-born film director Monty Banks in March 1940. She couldn’t live in England with him because as an Italian during the second world war, he would have been imprisoned. The couple went to America instead. Banks died of a heart attack on the Orient Express in 1950. Gracie married for a third time in 1952, to Boris Alperovici, a Romanian Radio repairman. She said he was the love of her life, and proposed to him on Christmas Day in front of friends and family.

8. In 1933, she set up the Gracie Fields Children's Home and Orphanage at Peacehaven, Sussex, for children of people in the theatre profession who could not look after their children.

9. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.

10. She died on 27 September 1979, aged 81.

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