Janette Scott is the only daughter of Dame Thora Hird : UK Newspaper Tributes to Dame Thora (who passed away in March 2003), and was one of Britain's best loved actresses, appear below

The Independent, London 17 March 2003

Dame Thora Hird

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

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 debut 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 dibut 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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The Guardian

Veronica Horwell

Monday March 17, 2003

Dame Thora Hird Much-loved actor whose performances captured the nuances and respectability of northern English life An interviewer from the Guardian once spent four hours recording Dame Thora Hird, who has died aged 91, stopping only because he ran out of tapes. "Listen to this," he enthused afterwards, and turned up the sound of her singing a rude ditty about "balls" (rhymed with "orchestra stalls") that she had written 60 years earlier. The journalist had interrogated Hollywood's top brass across their studio desks, but they never fired him up as did this octagenarian in a wheelchair, talking about God and Morecambe Co-op. He was responding to a national institution, venerable yet rorty, both Queen Mum and a Donald McGill seaside postcard. She was 86 in the year of that interview, and had just won the second of her three Bafta awards as best television actress - this time for Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologue, Waiting For The Telegram, playing a centenarian who wept on remembering that she had not bedded her sweetheart the night before he left to die in the trenches. Hird was not, she would sharply remind those who confused life and art, as old as the character - "It's not actually me, love, it's acting. That's what I'm paid for, it's pretending" - although she could just recall the first world war wounded convalescing in Morecambe. But then she could recall everything, even the names of her classmates at the Misses Nelson's prep school: Vera Muff, Madge Peel, Ada Lob and Maudie Poles. The Morecambe of Madge and Ada was home to Hird. Her dad, James Henry Hird, was manager of the Royalty theatre, and later of the entertainments on the pier, where a weekly ticket admitted holidaymakers to a pocket opera company and Madame Rosa Vere, who dived off in red tights every high tide, after which her mother passed the hat. Thora's own mother, Mary, had carried her daughter on stage at eight weeks old; mam was acting a lass who had been done wrong by the squire's son, and the bundled baby played the result. Theatre then was a reliable local business, like undertaking or clog repairs. On leaving school, Hird worked for 10 years behind the Co-op cash desk, storing away the look of Mrs Edale, "who always sucked a split pea", and Mrs Bradley, trying to feed 10 kids on nowt, and practised their mannerisms by night in the Royalty rep, while dad coached her timing and checked her inflections. George Formby spotted her in 1939, wanted her to play his mother and sent up a casting director from Ealing Studios to peer through his monocle at her. She was too young for the role, but was put under film contract anyway -£10 a week between parts and £10 a day in work. They gave her a £5 note to cover the fare, and she arrived at the studios to the sound of the first air raid siren of the second world war. Hird had sworn to her mam that she would, one day, wear a sequin-spangled frock, fur coat and orchids, and her mam had said she hoped it would keep fine for her; but on the wartime day when the beginnings of West End success financed a £50-fur, second-hand gown and slightly passi orchids, it poured down. She remained mindful of her dad's exactitude about timing. The night before he died, he told her: "You're a wonderful artist. I've lived to see you perform like you did tonight." Hird had her own family by then. In Morecambe, she had fancied James Scott, a drummer in the Winter Gardens orchestra, and they had courted decorously for four years, with him coming round to her mam's for supper every night until they married in 1937 (the wedding photos were all teeth and arum lilies). They returned from honeymoon with 3s 8d left. He believed in her: "You will get on," he said when they were broke, "and when you do, we'll go round the world." They laughed for an hour at that. Scott put down £25 on the plot of land which eventually became their house at Prompt Corner, complete with the luxury of a built-in kitchen cabinet. He said he wished he could give Hird more on their first anniversary than a bunch of chrysanths, and she said, you can, you can give me a baby: in 1938, their daughter Janette pulled into the world, with fish servers in lieu of forceps. When Hird did get on, Scotty became her house-husband, cook and chaffeur, and manager to both Hird and Janette, who had a movie career as a child and teenage actor. Scotty served his war as a bedpan-wallah with the RAF - his wife's description. Through the 1950s in British cinema, Hird was one of the company of what you might call the Real National Theatre - actors always present because they represented the familiar and the true. On screen and stage, in more than 700 roles, she drew on those customers she had shelved in her memory at the Co-op. Until the 1960s, she was usually cast condescendingly - from a gawky maid named Eunice Sidebottom up to about middling dragon landlady. As she said later, she had not been at the front of the queue when the looks were given out, so she was always a character - yes, she played the nurse in Romeo And Juliet. Yet she was John Osborne's favourite actor - cast, at his request, in The Entertainer (1960) - both because of her ability to turn moods on a sixpence and because one of her specialities was Osborne's pet hate, the narrow-minded mother-in-law with pretensions. Her best in that line was in John Schlesinger's A Kind Of Loving (1962), with Alan Bates as her angry young son-in-law: Hird shoved in your face the power in that vernacular adjective "interfering". She could do the dismissive mother of a floppy lad, too - Alan Bennett wrote her one in his television play Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), in which she tells him that being called Trevor is no bar to greatness; there had been a Trevor who had done well for himself in Northern Gas. Hird was a natural for television. Long before her alliance with Bennett, there had been a clutch of amiable series: Meet The Wife; her matriarch of an undertaker's family in In Loving Memory; The First Lady, in which her county councillor owed much to her own Auntie Nellie, who had hissed an aspirational "Yice" for "yes", and never proffered a plate of biscuits ungraced by a doiley. What seemed eccentricity in her work was really extreme precision about the concerns of a local world. She set the tone of the women in The Last Of The Summer Wine. Hird's conversation shared with Bennett's writing the exactly-placed names - a cup of Horlicks, a tumbler of dandelion and burdock - and a sense of a vast, lost innocence, of a world where knobbly knees were life's norm. They also shared a certain humour - "Dear Thora, Just come up to change the lavatory seat, love Alan" read one of his postcards from Yorkshire - and a disdain for approximation: "That's an 'if', not a 'but', and when you do a Bennett it is an 'if', not a 'but'," she remarked about memorising his scripts. The first solo he created for her, A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, in the original Talking Heads series, won her first Bafta award in 1988. Her character faced a lonely death after a fall in the isolation of home. Bennett forced Hird towards her core toughness - no mawkishness permitted - as did Derec Longden in Lost For Words, his 1999 play about the last weeks of his mother's life. "Do you want to be buried, mum, or cremated?" asks the son. "Oh, I don't know, love," Hird answers; then, after a pause timed to a nanosecond: "Surprise me." An easier side of her was visible for decades in television religious broadcasts, including her own series, Praise Be! Her chapel Christianity could come over comfy, although her relationship with "me pal oopstairs" clearly sustained her as the eventide fell. She used to say she had done a deal with him - no pain, when she was filming, in exchange for bearing whatever hurt when resting. Osteoarthritis demanded repeated hip replacements, she had a heart bypass and angina, and was immobilised after a kitchen fall too close to a Bennett script: "I was taking the little strings off the French beans, and I sat off the chair." After Scotty died of a stroke in 1994, Hird hired professional help, and worked on to pay their wages. There was still family, Janette and the grandchildren. It is a curious fact that her son-in-law was the singer Mel Torme (obituary, June 7 1999); she had visited the family in Beverly Hills 24 times - "It's perfect for a holiday, but there's no corner shop, love." Her autobiography, Scene And Hird, appeared in 1976. She was made an OBE in 1983, got an hon DLitt from Lancaster University in 1989, and became a dame in 1993. She met Princess Diana nine times and the Queen repeatedly, but it did not modify her memory of who she had been. "Never forget," she told an awed reporter, "I scrubbed my mother's steps when I was younger... Will you fetch me mink?"

Thora Hird, actor, born May 28 1911; died March 15 2003

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The Times, London March 17, 2003

Dame Thora Hird: North Country actress who created many memorable characters and presented a Christian television programme

Alan Bennett described her as a national treasure. In 1999 a newspaper poll voted her the most popular living person in Britain after the Queen Mother. First appearing on stage as an eight-week-old baby, Thora Hird went on to achieve lasting fame in films and television with her deft, tragi-comic portrayals of North Country women from fag-dangling chars to refeened surburban matrons misplacing their aitches. Her blunt, warm-hearted personality, acerbic when needed, in such television series as Meet the Wife, First Lady, In Loving Memory and Last of the Summer Wine, made her a living-room favourite in millions of homes from the early Sixties. She could be hilariously funny, sweetly sentimental and jarringly dramatic in the same speech, certainly in the same scene. A fine example of her versatility came when, in her late seventies and painfully arthritic, she played Doris, the pathetic but fiercely independent old woman in Alan Bennett s Talking Heads monologue, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee. Her heartfelt and beautifully realised performance was recognised with a Bafta award. She created memorable characters, no matter how brief the role, in more than 100 films dating back to the early 1940s. Acidulous landladies, nosy neighbours, garrulous old maids were among her specialities, and if comedy was her preferred mode her portrayal of Alan Bates scathing mother-in-law in A Kind of Loving (1962) was frighteningly authentic. Her North Country pragmatism enabled her to enjoy her career without possessing the beauty or the glamour necessary for Hollywood stardom. Just five feet tall and weighing around eight stone, she dryly observed: I reckon God has a look at you and if he hasn t given you much in the looks he makes up for it with something else I ve got a sense of humour and a photographic memory. A devout Christian, Hird was for 17 years the presenter of the Sunday evening television programme Praise Be!, in which she introduced viewers favourite hymns. She attracted a huge postbag from people, many of them lonely or in poor health, who responded to her warmth and sincerity, were comforted by her words and looked on her as a friend. Thora Hird was born and grew up in Morecambe, Lancashire. Her father, James Henry Hird, was manager of the resorts Royalty Theatre and later took over the running of the Central Pier. Her mother, May Jane Mayor, was an actress. With the family living in the house alongside the Royalty it went with her father s job its stage was often a playground for Thora and her brother Neville, the elder by 21 months. A third sibling, Olga, was killed in a road accident. Hird s first appearance before a live audience was when her mother was playing a village maiden seduced by the squire s son, a liaison resulting in an illegitimate baby which was required to be produced on stage. James Hird, who was directing the melodrama, dispensed with the customary bundle of clothes to represent the child and told his wife to carry the sleeping Thora on instead. She was to say it was the only part she ever got through influence. Her earliest childhood memory as an entertainer was as a four-year-old singing to wounded soldiers brought back from the trenches of France in the First World War. She recalled: I was dressed in a crinoline and bonnet and wondering why their arms and feet were bandaged. Her growing resolve to go on the stage was influenced not only by her parents, but by the weekly antics of her childhood heroine Pearl White, star of the adventure serials in the silent cinema: Girls today may want to be Madonna but never as much as I wanted to be Pearl White. She left school at 14, after being school captain and head girl twice, and for a time worked in her father s office in between learning French, cooking, shorthand, typing and book-keeping at night school. Her father discouraged a theatrical career for her, condemning the profession as being too precarious, but she was able to overcome his objections when, in 1931, she was approached by the Morecambe repertory company and began to appear regularly in small roles. For the next few years she developed her natural comic talent to form the bedrock of what was to become her accomplished character acting skills. Although she would often describe herself as a Morecambe virgin , Hird had several boyfriends before meeting, and being courted for three years, by her husband-to-be James Scott. The closest of marriages, it lasted for 57 years until his death in 1994. In her 1975 autobiography, Scene and Hird, she recalled how they had only 3s 8d in old money to spend while on honeymoon. Years later she paid him this typically humorous tribute: I can turn over in bed with my pins in and see my husband and say I m glad it s you . They had a daughter, Janette Scott, a film actress of the 1950s and 1960s who was at one time married to the singer Mel Torme. While Hird was at Morecambe Rep, playing a woman of 60, the casting director of Ealing Film Studios invited her to London for a screen test. She was up for the role of George Formby s mother in one of his madcap comedies but was passed over as being too young. However, she impressed the studio enough to be signed to a contract, receiving £10 a week if she wasn t filming and £10 a day when she was. At first her parentally instilled Northern integrity caused her to baulk at receiving a salary for doing nothing, but this was soon explained and her objections quashed. Although she enjoyed filming, the stage was very much in her blood and in October 1944 she landed her first West End part at the Vaudeville Theatre as Mrs Gaye in No Medals. Four years later she was acclaimed for her Mrs Holmes in Flowers for the Living at the New Lindsay, and also the following year for her Emmie Slee in The Queen Came By at the Embassy and later the Duke of York s. Both, understandably, were favourite roles. For the next three decades and more she was to combine her flourishing film and television career with frequent stage appearances in London and the regions. Among her plays were Tobacco Road, The Happy Family, The Love Match with Arthur Askey, Came Rain Come Shine, My Perfect Wife, and the 1973 revival of No, No Nanette, in which she was the scene-stealing comic domestic servant to Anna Neagle. She had made the London Palladium six years earlier as one of the stars of the variety show, London Laughs. In 1972 in Sydney, Australia, where her cosily robust personality was as popular as it was in Britain, she received a standing ovation for her 1,000th performance as Ada Thorpe in the play Saturday Night at the Crown. Written for her by Walter Greenwood, she first opened with it at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool, in 1956, later transferring to the Garrick Theatre in London. Television, though, was the medium that was to bring her her widest and most enduring fame and make her a much-loved British institution. She starred with the comic Freddie Frinton in Meet the Wife, one of the most successful comedies of the Sixties. The show ran for five years and was still at its peak when she decided to move on. She switched from situation comedy to the drama series The First Lady, in which she played Councillor Danby, an independent member of a Labour-controlled Yorkshire town council. She was so convincing that viewers wrote hundreds of letters a week pleading with her to find them a house or get their drains fixed. In 1970 she moved back to comedy and over to ITV to play one of her busybody characters, a Northern boarding-house landlady in Ours is a Nice House, which pleased her fans if not the critics. After a nine-year break from television series she returned for her most successful vehicle since Meet the Wife. In ITV s In Loving Memory, set in the late 1920s, she played Ivy Unsworth who, with her gormless nephew Billy (Christopher Beeny), ran a firm of undertakers. Later came Flesh and Blood, a comedy-drama about a well-off Dales family in which she played the 84-year-old mother of the cement factory boss Bill Fraser. One of her many awards, though the show ran for only seven episodes, came for her role as a Salvation Army captain in Hallelujah!. Meanwhile, she had established herself as a substantial straight actress in the television plays of Alan Bennett, a fellow Northerner whose sharp observation of the idiosyncracies of ordinary speech she so brilliantly interpreted. Fondly remembered gems include one from Me! I m Afraid of Virgina Woolf. Puzzled by her ignorance of lesbians, her character s son explains that they are women who sleep together. Well, that s nothing , she retorts, I slept with your Auntie Phyllis all during the air raids. In her later years Hird showed extraordinary courage in face of crippling osteoarthritis. She had operations to replace both her hips twice over, and in 1992 underwent heart by-pass surgery. After more heart surgery in 2000 she was fitted with a pace-maker. Yet she never let illness prevent her from working. She joined Roy Clarke s band of formidable women in Last of the Summer Wine, continued to present Praise Be! and played telling roles in the television dramas Memento Mori, Goggle Eyes and Wide-Eyed and Legless. Approaching her ninetieth year, she continued to act as effectively as ever. In 1999 and 2000 she won further Baftas as best television actress, for Violet, remembering the boyfriend who was killed in the First World War, in another Alan Bennett monologue, Waiting for the Telegram, and as Annie Longden, a woman struggling to speak after a stroke, in Lost For Words. The second role also won her an American Emmy award. She was appointed OBE in 1983 and DBE in 1993. She is survived by her daughter.

Dame Thora Hird, OBE, actress, was born on May 28, 1911. She died on March 15, 2003, aged 91.

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Daily Telegraph 17/03/2003

Dame Thora Hird

Dame Thora Hird , who has died aged 91, was the actress, comedienne and television presenter whose warmth, humanity and remarkable professional longevity made her a true candidate for that overworked epithet "much-loved". She seemed to have been playing charwomen, nurses, nannies and mothers-in-law for as long as anyone could remember. This was because her career had begun in 1911, when she was only eight weeks old, and was carried on stage by her mother, Mary. It was still underway almost 90 years later. Although she appeared in more than 100 films, and with luminaries such as Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando, the parts were almost always small ones. In her early years this was also often the case on the stage. It was not until the early 1960s that she fully impinged upon the public's consciousness, and by then she had aged into the roles for which she was best suited. A highly astute character actress, she was capable of the look, gesture or inflection that distilled comedy from the quotidian. She was adept at unsentimental pathos, often alloyed with unexpected comedy, which explored the tragedy of ordinary lives. Her appearances in the plays of Alan Bennett, a writer almost programmed to write ideal material for her, was, for many, her finest work. Her talent as an actress was to make audiences believe she was the part she played. After Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under the Settee (1987), in which she played an elderly woman who does not want to be made to go into a home for the aged, she received a number of letters inviting her to go and live with the letter-writer, rather than into the home. For once the suspension of disbelief worked in both directions. It was this ability to touch viewers' sympathies, in addition to her lifelong spirituality, that rendered her eminently suitable to host Praise Be!, the long-running television programme in which viewers requested hymns. Thora Hird's natural optimism and innate belief in the goodness of life made her a beacon for the elderly, the infirm and the lonely. It was these qualities which underscored her popularity and, combined with her lifelong professionalism and dedication to her craft, they enabled her to portray character and humanity in all its kaleidoscopic variants, never abusing its tragedy or its comedy. Thora Hird was born on May 28 1911 at Morecambe, Lancashire, the youngest of three children, though her sister was not to survive childhood. Her mother was an actress and her father, James Henry Hird, had been a travelling actor, a swimming pool attendant and stage manager of the West End Pier Theatre in Morecambe, before ascending, via the Alhambra, to become stage manager, producer and director at the larger Royalty Theatre. Thora made her debut at the Royalty aged eight weeks, for her perfectionist father refused to allow an actress to carry a doll if the genuine article could be provided. It was, she said, "the first and only job I ever got through influence". She was brought up in the shadow of the proscenium arch. The family lived next door to the theatre, in which she and her brother spent many childhood hours. Once, while tip-toeing behind the backcloth during a performance, the four-year-old Thora and her six-year-old brother emerged on to the stage as, unbeknown to them, the backcloth had a large gap. Hoping that no one would notice if they pretended to be part of the play, they executed a military two-step unrelated to the drama unfolding. Howls of laughter erupted, further encouraging them, until they were hustled offstage by their mother, father in hot pursuit. Thora was educated at The Misses Nelson's Prep School at Morecambe, which she reluctantly left aged 14. She worked in the music shop on the Central Pier, for her father and in the local Co-op, whose customers she studied for reproduction on stage, and whose mannerisms bore fruit throughout her career. "When I'm not a good enough actress to build a character, I think of someone who came in the Co-op." She made her teenage debut in repertory at the Royalty in Yellow Sand by Eden Philpotts, in which she played a twin who merely echoed her sibling. Consequently, there were no lines to be learnt, a benefit reflected in her pay of £1 a week. Spotted by George Formby playing the mother-in-law in As You Are, she was invited to Ealing Studios for a screen test. Required merely to say the line, "I shall go to London", after multiple attempts Hird exploded: "I shall go to London, and bugger you and bugger everything else because I don't think I'm any good at this". She was placed under contract, £10 a week if not filming, £10 a day if she was. Her first film was The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1941) for which she was selected after the director saw her screen test and said: "What a face! Send her a telegram." She played a secretary. This was followed by The Big Blockade (1942), with Michael Redgrave, in which she played a barmaid at a German railway station. Her first part took two days to shoot, double that of her second. Throughout the 1940s Thora Hird appeared in small parts in unremarkable films such as Corridor of Mirrors (1946) and The Conspirators (1949) which, if they failed to establish her name, allowed her to hone her craft. After a period juggling the demands of rep in Lancashire, filmwork at Ealing and bringing up her daughter on her own - her husband was in the RAF during the war - Thora Hird made her West End debut in 1940, and appeared in No Medals (1944) at the Vaudeville, playing a 60-year-old Cockney charlady. Never starstruck or self-important, Thora Hird's sense of perspective was reinforced when, after the first night performance, she saw two dogs separately, but with equal enthusiasm, defecate over her name on a billboard. Having reprised the role in the film version The Weaker Sex, Thora Hird performed the role of a middle-aged Cockney struggling through life in Flowers for the Living. It was the role that won her a contract with J Arthur Rank, but was touched by tragedy when her father died the night after seeing her in the West End for the first time. In 1951 she starred opposite Henry Kendall in The Happy Family at the Duchess Theatre. Discovering they shared a birthday that would occur during the run, they arranged a party for all involved after the Saturday night show. Unfortunately, the party was announced during the Wednesday interval, leading the audience to assume they were invited. Hundreds appeared, including a coach party from Beckenham which had travelled in order to arrive after the play, for, as one woman said "they had never been to an actor's party like this before". Thora Hird was by now rarely out of work. In addition to her theatre work, she appeared in numerous films, in parts that were, by her own account, "a cough and a spit - and frequently the same sort of coughing and spitting". She recalled that she was invariably called by the wardrobe department prior to arriving at the studios and asked: "Same sort of thing as usual, Thora - wrapover apron, head scarf and curl pins?" When she appeared in the film of Romeo and Juliet it was as the nurse. By contrast, in the theatre, she was winning starring roles. She played the heroine, Emmie Slee, in The Queen Came By, by R F Delderfield, written for Queen Victoria's Silver Jubilee, twice on the stage and twice in television adaptations. The second television adaptation was memorable because, for the only time in her career, she played opposite her teenage daughter Janette Scott, who subsequently became an actress of sufficient fame that, in a pub in Oldham to which the cast had retired after a play, Thora Hird was welcomed by the MC as "Janette Scott's mother". After appearing in the film of John Osborne's play The Entertainer (1960) and becoming the voice of the Mother's Pride bread advertisement - "I'm the mother in Mother's Pride!" - Thora Hird found small screen success appearing opposite the comedian Freddie Frinton in Meet the Wife (1964). So successful was the pairing that many people assumed they were married, which lead to much consternation when Thora was out with her husband and was greeted by leering viewers promising not to tell her "husband" of her infidelity. Thora Hird loved every minute of her work and the people with whom she worked. She was capable of withstanding strenuous workloads. While rehearsing Meet the Wife each morning, she was appearing twice nightly (three times on Saturdays) at the Palladium alongside Harry Secombe, Russ Conway and Jimmy Tarbuck in London Laughs and recording Meet the Wife on Sundays. On Monday, her day off, she recorded the radio show One Born Every Minute at the BBC. By the mid-1960s she was appearing almost nightly on television, whether in game shows (Call My Bluff), drama (Dixon of Dock Green), children's television (Jackanory), variety (The Good Old Days) or advertisements (Biotex). These heady days continued into the next decade and were breathlessly and lovingly recounted in the first volume of her memoirs, Scene and Hird (1976). The next year, Thora Hird began to present Your Songs of Praise Choice, in which viewers were invited to select their favourite hymns. Fortunately, this rather cumbersome title was changed to the pithier Praise Be!, and the programme then had a 17-year run. Although considered unacceptably mawkish by some critics, Praise Be!, which was presented initially from a BBC studio and subsequently from Thora's (or her daughter's) home, garnered an army of loyal viewers. Letters and requests arrived in sacks, ranging from complaints about the colour of her fingernails to complaints about why particular hymns had or had not been played. With the show's mounting popularity, Thora Hird became used to being accosted on the street or the set with requests - once, memorably, by someone who, having complained about "me mother's favourite" having not been played, was unable to remember the name of the hymn. In 1978 she played Ivy Unsworth, a funeral director's wife, in In Loving Memory, a successful television sitcom, and followed this with the part of Emily Ridley, a Salvation Army Captain, in Hallelujah! She was remarkable in many individual plays, notably Alan Bennett's Intensive Care. One of the underestimated achievements of Thora Hird's career was the facility with which she moved with the times. As technology and production qualities improved, as the theatre gave way to broadcast radio, film and television, so Thora Hird adapted to each new medium, reliant upon, and confident in, the quality of her performance, her professionalism and her craft. She was never one to hark back to the old days, though she remembered them happily, often pointing out that an actress's lot was singularly better served in the modern age - notably whilst filming Muriel Spark's Memento Mori (1992), when she had a chauffeur to take her to the lavatory on the set. In 1987 Thora Hird filled several roles in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series. Her performance in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee - in which she played the houseproud Doris, who suffers a fall and spots the object of the title - won her the 1988 Bafta award and led to numerous screen opportunities. "The simplest thing I can say is that I tried to make this lady like the millions of other women like her everywhere," Thora Hird explained. "And I aimed to make people forget that it was actually me. It was a tremendous challenge, but it was a lovely challenge having all those words to learn because Alan's words are so truthful and so lifelike." She appeared (for 19 years) in the long-running comedy Last of the Summer Wine, as Edie Pegden, starred alongside Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent in Wide Eyed and Legless and enjoyed cameo roles in All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat. As late as 1999, Thora Hird was appearing in new drama. She was Violet in Alan Bennett's Waiting for the Telegram, and Pete Postlethwaite's elderly mother in the tragi-comic Lost for Words, in which she played a stroke victim who regretted a lost opportunity for love. She won Baftas as Best TV Actress for both, and an Emmy for the latter. In between performances she found time to complete her second volume of autobiography Is It Thora? (1996) which, like the first volume, mingled her obvious love of showbusiness and its characters and friendships with homespun philosophising and occasionally cloying "Northern" simplicity. She followed it up with Not in the Diary (2000) and Nothing Like A Dame (2001). By now perceived as one of the "Grandes Dames" of the British entertainment industry, Thora Hird, having been appointed OBE in 1983, was advanced to DBE in 1993, the year in which she was also the subject of a South Bank Show presented by Melvyn Bragg. She was awarded an honorary DLitt by Lancaster University, won the Pye Award for Comedy, and became the first woman member of the Royal Television Society's Hall of Fame. She won awards for her work with Help the Aged, was a Woman of the Year, and was awarded a Lifetime Contribution to the performing arts Bafta. The jokes which followed her role as the "face" of Churchill stairlifts she took with robust good humour, arguing - correctly - that it was a product many of her age found useful. Her recreations were gardening and travel. The latter was inherited from her parents, who at the turn of the century had performed in every county in England "and had the postcards to prove it!" In 1994, Thora Hird led a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a venture that brought her great joy. The next year she took a pilgrimage to Jordan. In 1994 James Scott, her manager, confidant and much-loved husband since 1937, died. Ever professional, and despite being the veteran of three hip operations, angina and arthritis, she continued to work. Dame Thora Hird, who had recently been living at a retirement home for actors in south-west London, suffered a stroke last weekend, and died on Saturday. She is survived by her daughter.