Dame Thora Hird

Down-to-earth actress who induced both laughter and tears

Monday 17 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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Thora Hird, actress: born Morecambe, Lancashire 28 May 1911; OBE 1983, DBE 1993; married 1937 James Scott (died 1994; one daughter); died London 15 March 2003.

For more than half a century, Thora Hird was one of Britain's best-loved actresses on stage, film and television. As a prolific character player in the cinema, she was stereotyped as cleaners, landladies and mothers, but could switch adeptly from her native Lancashire accent to cockney and even middle-class Home Counties.

Her screen children included Dirk Bogarde and Shirley Ann Field, but Hird was particularly memorable displaying her disgust as Alan Bates's dragon-like mother-in-law in the gritty Northern drama A Kind of Loving, based on Stan Barstow's 1960 novel. "You filthy, disgusting pig," she spat out as Bates, arriving home drunk, vomited over the back of her sofa.

By then, the actress had already carved out a successful career on the West End stage, but she achieved her greatest fame on television as the star of sitcoms such as Meet the Wife, Ours is a Nice House, In Loving Memory and Hallelujah, as well as playing Edie Pegden, the nagging wife of Wesley, in Last of the Summer Wine. All of these programmes represented an England of the middle of the 20th century, complete with "family values".

Hird could perform comedy and tragedy with equal strength. In one of Alan Bennett's six Talking Heads monologues, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, she memorably portrayed a bitter widow, Doris, who seemed to have no fond memories of her late husband and must have been a tyrant to live with. Says Doris:

I'm going to save that cream cracker and I'm going to show it to her next time she starts on at me about Stafford House. I'll say, "Don't Stafford House me, lady. This cream cracker was under the settee, and I've only got to send this cream cracker to the director of social services and you will be on the carpet, same as this cream cracker."

Hird's longevity as an actress was a result, in part, of not playing romantic leads in her younger days. This meant that she did not have to reinvent herself as she grew older, in order to continue taking starring roles. Throughout she retained the down-to-earth qualities that audiences found so lovable in her. "I've never kidded myself I was in the front row when good looks were being given out, but I like being ordinary," she once said. "People come up to me – strangers – and chat because I'm ordinary. I like that. I've no conceit. Please God, I can't even spell it."

Her feet were kept firmly on the ground as a child in Morecambe by her father, who was the stage manager at the town's Royalty Theatre. She was born in the Lancashire seaside resort in 1911 and her mother was an actress, so a theatrical career was always a likelihood. At the age of eight weeks, she was carried on to the Royalty stage to play the illegitimate child of the village maiden, who was acted by her mother, and four years later sang to wounded First World War soldiers.

Although Hird continued to act in amateur theatricals, she began her working life as a cashier at the Lancaster & District Co-op in Morecambe. This gave her the chance to observe the customers and their peculiarities. "I've played nearly all of them now," she said in 1998.

Hird was tempted back to the stage full-time in 1931, when she was invited to join the Morecambe Repertory Company, at the Royalty Theatre, earning £1 a week, although her father had long since retired as stage manager. While still in her twenties, playing a 60-year-old mother-in-law in As You Are, she was spotted by the ukelele-playing Lancashire comedian George Formby, one of the cinema's top box-office stars of the Thirties and early Forties. He alerted Ealing Studios to her talent and she was signed to a contract worth £10 a week, plus £10 for every day that she worked.

After making her screen début in Spellbound (1940) for Pyramid Amalgamated, which preceded the Ingrid Bergman/Gregory Peck American film of the same name, Hird appeared in a string of Ealing Studios' wartime propaganda films and comedies. She acted Will Hay's secretary in The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1941), a German barmaid at a railway station buffet in The Big Blockade (1941), a documentary-style revue featuring major stars such as Leslie Banks, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Will Hay and Robert Morley, and an ATS girl in Next of Kin (1942).

Hird then played a horsy land girl in Went the Day Well? (1942), based on a Graham Greene story about the fictional German invasion of an English village, but reverted to type as a barmaid in The Foreman Went to France (1942). She switched to Gainsborough Studios for the Frank Launder/Sidney Gilliat comedy 2,000 Women (1944) and was seen in a string of British pictures for various studios in the post-war cinema boom. She acted in the hugely popular upstairs-downstairs drama The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), alongside Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding, and played Dirk Bogarde's mother in Once a Jolly Swagman (1948), the story of a factory worker who becomes a speedway rider.

Thora Hird never made it as a leading lady in the cinema but carved out a screen career as a prolific character actress, making as many as seven films a year. Most of the pictures are long forgotten, but some of the most notable of the Fifties were The Quatermass Experiment (1955), a low-budget Hammer film version of the writer Nigel Kneale's legendary television series, Simon and Laura (1955), starring Peter Finch, Kay Kendall and Ian Carmichael in the screen version of a West End theatre hit, and Sailor Beware! (1956), featuring Peggy Mount recreating her long-running London stage role.

In the Sixties, Hird was seen in three of her best film parts, with Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (1960), based on John Osborne's play, Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving (1962), and Harry H. Corbett in Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), which also originated in the theatre.

She later found fame in starring roles on television. First, Hird attracted up to 15 million viewers a week as Thora Blacklock in three series of the BBC sitcom Meet the Wife (1964-66), which followed the everyday ups and downs of married life for a middle-aged couple. Thora and her husband Freddie (played by Freddie Frinton) had previously been introduced in the Comedy Playhouse pilot The Bed (1963), set shortly after the couple's 25th wedding anniversary.

Switching to ITV, Hird played the Northern boarding-house landlady Thora Parker in Ours is a Nice House (1969), whose comedy revolved around the comings and goings of residents, as well as her two teenaged children, grandmother and a neighbour.

In the same year, Dick Sharples wrote a single comedy play entitled In Loving Memory, centred on the lives of a father and daughter who ran an ailing undertaking business in the late Twenties. Edward Chapman and Marjorie Rhodes starred in the pilot but, when it was revived as a series (1979-86), Hird took the role of Ivy Unsworth. Freddie Jones played the father, Jeremiah, but the character died in the first episode, so Ivy took over the business and her gormless nephew, Billy (Christopher Beeny), stepped in to help. Over seven years and 36 episodes, the series attracted audiences of up to 15 million, demonstrating Hird's continuing appeal.

Before it ended, she also found success with another Dick Sharples comedy, Hallelujah (1983-84). Hird played a Salvation Army captain, Emily Ridley, who sought to rid the fictional Yorkshire town of Brigthorpe of its sinners but failed dismally and resisted all attempts to persuade her to retire.

The writer-actor Alan Bennett gave audiences another glimpse of Hird's talents when she appeared first in his television play Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), then as the formidable Aunt Kitty in Intensive Care (1982). Bennett credited her with transforming a scene in a hospital waiting room in Intensive Care by holding a flask of coffee and a cup, pouring the drink and sipping it in between dialogue.

Her Talking Heads monologue A Cream Cracker Under the Settee followed in 1988 – earning her a Bafta award as Best TV Actress – and, 10 years later, Hird played Violet in the Talking Heads 2 monologue Waiting for the Telegram.

In fact, television viewers had much earlier seen Hird in a dramatic role, as the crusading, newly elected independent borough councillor Sarah Danby in 30 episodes of The First Lady (1968-69), written by Alan Plater. Her role as Pete Postlethwaite's ailing mother in Lost for Words (1999), the writer Deric Longden's autobiographical television play about an elderly woman's final, tragicomic months, confirmed Hird as a performer who could induce both laughter and tears.

She joined Last of the Summer Wine for its 1986 Christmas special as Edie Pegden, sister of the crackpot inventor Seymour Utterthwaite (Michael Aldridge) and wife of the henpecked car mechanic Wesley (the late Gordon Wharmby). After this special, in which the Pegdens' daughter, Glenda (Sarah Thomas), married Barry Wilkinson (Mike Grady), Hird became a permanent fixture in the writer Roy Clarke's gentle, Yorkshire-set comedy, establishing herself as the tutting ringleader of the women.

As a lifelong Christian, the actress also presented the viewers' requests programme Your Songs of Praise Choice (1977-83) and its sequel, Praise Be! (1984-93), and for a long time Hird's distinctive Lancashire vowels were heard in Mother's Pride television commercials.

Throughout her years in the cinema, Hird also had a successful career on the London West End stage. She made her début as the comic charlady Mrs Gaye, alongside Fay Compton and Frederick Leicester, in No Medals (Vaudeville Theatre, 1944). Once again, she was playing a 60-year-old, when she was still in her early thirties. The production ran for two years and Hird repeated her role in the 1948 film version, entitled The Weaker Sex. In the same vein, she acted a hardworking, middle-aged cockney in Flowers for the Living (1948) at the small New Lindsey Theatre, in Notting Hill Gate. When the celebrated writer-producer-director Sydney Box saw her in the production, she was signed to a film contract with Rank.

Hird repeated the role of Emmie Slee in The Queen Came By (Embassy Theatre, 1948, and Duke of York's Theatre, 1949) in two BBC television productions of the play (1955, 1957). She also played Mervyn Johns's pellagra-stricken wife with 17 children in Tobacco Road (Embassy and Playhouse Theatres, 1949) and acted opposite Henry Kendall in The Happy Family (Embassy and Duchess Theatres, 1951).

The actress's other West End plays included The Same Sky (Lyric, Hammersmith, and Duke of York's, 1952), The Troublemakers (Strand, 1952), The Love Match (Palace, 1953), Saturday Night at the Crown (Garrick, 1957), You Prove It (St Martin's, 1961) and No, No, Nanette (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1973).

Radio also utilised Hird's talents. She starred as a widowed pub landlady in Dog and Duck (1959), the comedian Ted Ray's housekeeper in How's Your Father (1964), a rural district nurse in There's One Born Every Minute (1966) and the leader of a group of OAPs taking on new challenges in Never Too Late (1980-81).

Hird wrote three autobiographies, Scene and Hird (1976), Is It Thora?: my autobiography 1975-1995 (1996) and Nothing Like a Dame (2001), as well as Not in the Diary (2000), a book of reflections and behind-the-scenes stories. The former actress Janette Scott is Hird's daughter from her 57-year marriage to the musician Jimmy Scott, whom she had met in the Thirties, when he was a drummer with the Morecambe Winter Gardens Orchestra and who died in 1994. "Scotty" managed his wife and daughter's careers for many years. Mother and daughter appeared in several films together and in the 1957 television version of The Queen Came By.

In 1993, the Royal Television Society elected Hird to its Hall of Fame. Five years later, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the British Comedy Awards.

Anthony Hayward

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