Thora was born in 1911 in the seaside town of Morecambe in Lancashire, where her father was the manager of the local Royalty Theatre. Although her first appearance as a baby was not exactly a speaking role, she went on to take part in song and dance acts before she was three. Pragmatic from the first, by the age of sixteen she was working in the local Co-op store during the day, and acting in repertory theatre at night.
She worked in Blackpool selling sheet music - which involved singing the songs themselves - but she was thirty before she was first signed to appear in movies. She was eventually signed up by the giant Rank Organisation (the nearest Britain had to a major film studio) after her success on stage in London's West End.
Her film work saw Thora acting alongside some of the greatest names in the twentieth century, including Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer", Alan Bates in "A Kind of Loving" and Marlon Brando in "The Nightcomers".
But it was on TV that she found her way into the hearts of millions of viewers around the world. One of her first appearances was a BBC drama called "The Queen Came By" about life in a draper's store during the time of Queen Victoria (It doesn't sound very promising, but maybe we had longer attention spans in those days).
In situation comedies such as "Meet the Wife", Thora found her most popular home. She often played no-nonsense women from the north of England, and frequently played opposite a hen-pecked member of the opposite sex (notably Freddie Frinton in "Meet the Wife" and Christopher Beeny in "In Loving Memory", where he was her put-upon son working for her in a funeral parlour).
Most recently, Thora Hird starred in "Last of the Summer Wine", as a woman who is house-proud to the point of insanity.
Go To Page: 1 2
