Dame Gracie Fields (born Grace Stansfield; 9 January 1898 – 27 September 1979) was a British actress, singer and comedian.

[7] Fields made her first stage appearance as a child, in 1905, joining children's repertory theatre groups such as "Haley's Garden of Girls" and Clara Coverdale's "Nine Dainty Dots".

[10] Fields met the comedian and impresario Archie Pitt and they began working together in Percy Hall's touring show Yes, I Think So.

In 1933, His Master's Voice produced the four millionth Fields record, which was pressed by the singer herself on camera and celebrated with a special 'Lancashire Lunch' at the Trocadero .

[citation needed] The final few lines of the song "Sally", which Fields sang at every performance from 1931 onwards, were written by her husband's mistress, Annie Lipman.

She donated her house in The Bishops Avenue, north London – which she had not much cared for, and shared with her husband Pitt and his mistress – to an orphanage after the marriage broke down.

Fields also helped Rochdale Association Football Club in the 1930s, when they were struggling to pay fees and buy sports equipment.

[19] World War II was declared while she was recovering in Capri, and Fields – still very ill after her cancer surgery – threw herself into her work and signed up for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) headed by her old film producer, Basil Dean.

Fields travelled to France to entertain the troops in the midst of air-raids, performing on the backs of open lorries and in war-torn areas.

However, because Banks remained an Italian citizen and would have been interned in the United Kingdom after Italy declared war in 1940, she went with him to North America, possibly at the suggestion of Winston Churchill who told her to "Make American Dollars, not British Pounds", which she did, in aid of the Navy League and the Spitfire Fund.

Although she continued to spend much of her time entertaining troops and otherwise supporting the war effort outside Britain, this led to a decline in her popularity at home.

The BBC gave her her own weekly radio show in 1947, dubbed Our Gracie's Working Party, in which 12 towns were visited by Fields.

She continued recording, but made no more films, moving more towards light classical music as popular tastes changed, often adopting a religious theme.

It was favoured by many Hollywood stars during the 1950s, with regular guests including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo and Noël Coward.

In 1956, Fields was the first actress to portray Miss Marple on screen,[24] in a US Television (Goodyear Playhouse) production of Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced.

She also starred in Television productions of A Tale of Two Cities (DuPont Show of the Month, 1958), The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (United States Steel Hour)– for which she won a Sylvania Award (1956) and received an EMMY Award nomination for Best Single Performance by an Actress (1957) – and Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris (Studio One), which was remade years later with Angela Lansbury as Mrs Harris, a charwoman in search of a fur coat (or a Christian Dior gown in Lansbury's case).

This followed on from her popularity on Stars on Sunday, a religious programme on Britain's ITV, in which well-known performers sang hymns or read extracts from the Bible.

[33] Fields was notified by her confidant John Taylor, while she was in America, that she had received the Queen's invitation to become a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (in the 1979 New Years Honours List), to which she replied: "Yes I'll accept, yes I can kneel – but I might need help getting back up, and yes I'll attend – as long as they don't call Boris 'Buttons'."

Seven months before her death in 1979, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.

[6] Fields's health declined in July 1979, when she contracted pneumonia after performing an open-air concert on the Royal Yacht, which was docked in Capri's harbour.

In February 1979, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire[34] seven months before her death at her home on Capri, aged 81.

was a 2009 biopic TV film on her life, with Jane Horrocks playing Fields and Tom Hollander her husband Monty Banks.

She ran on the Southampton-Cowes route until the outbreak of World War II, when she was requisitioned and served as a minesweeper as HMS Gracie Fields.

[42] On 3 October 2009, the final train to run on the Oldham Loop before it closed to be converted to a Manchester Metrolink tramway, a Class 156, was named in her honour.

[44] For a number of years, British film exhibitors voted her among the top ten stars in Britain at the box office via an annual poll in the Motion Picture Herald.