Dame Thora Hird DBE (28 May 1911 - 15 March 2003) was an English actress and is best remembered for all her successful comedy roles.

Hird was born in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe. She was the mother of the actress Janette Scott, and thus formerly the mother-in-law of the singer Mel Tormé.

Her first ever appearance on stage was when she was two months old in a play her father was managing. Her family background was largely theatrical: her mother, Marie Mayor, had been an actress, while her father managed a number of entertainment venues in Morecambe, to include the Royalty Theatre where she made her first appearance, and the Central Pier. Thora often described her father as her sternest critic and attributed much of her talent as an actress and comedienne to his guidance. Although Thora left Morecambe in the late 1940s, she retained her affection for the town, referring to herself as a "sand grown'un", the colloquial term for anyone born in Morecambe.

Thora Hird was mainly associated with television comedy, notably the sitcoms Meet the Wife (a 1960s classic), In Loving Memory and later series of Last of the Summer Wine. However, she played a variety of roles, including the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and won BAFTA Best Actress awards for her roles in two of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues. She starred as Captain Emily Ridley in the sitcom Hallelujah! about the Salvation Army, a movement for which she had a soft spot throughout her life. She played the screen mother of Deric Longden in Wide Eyed and Legless (AKA the Wedding Gift) and Lost For Words which won her a BAFTA for Best Actress.

Hird was a committed Christian, hosting the religious programme 'Praise Be!', a spin-off from Songs of Praise on the BBC. Her work for charity and on television in spite of old age and ill health made her an institution. Her advertisements for Churchill stairlifts (often misidentified as Stannah) also maintained her in the public eye.

Most of her earlier film work still survives, including her 1942 appearance in the classic wartime propaganda film Went the Day Well?. She also worked with the classic British film comedian Will Hay. Hird starred opposite Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer 1960

She was created an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1983, and raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1993. She received an honorary D.Litt. from Lancaster University in 1989.

Hird's energy and resilience were such that, even following the news that she had suffered a stroke, BBC bosses were still hoping that she would recover in order to appear in the next series of Last of the Summer Wine.

She died, aged 91, in March 2003, having suffered a stroke.

In a career than spanned eight decades Thora Hird was widely regarded as one of Britain's finest character actresses. She made over 100 films as well as starring in a host of tv comedies and as a straight actress excelled in the works of the playwright Alan Bennett. Even in her 90s she was working almost daily. Born in Morecambe, Lancashire, the daughter of the manager of the local Royalty Theatre, she was carried on to the stage in a melodrama at the age of eight weeks. When old enough she joined the Royalty's theatre company although kept on a day job as a cashier in a grocery store. "I spent 10 years working in that grocery store" she recalled, "and I've played nearly all the customers I used to serve - maids, landladies, cleaners, forthright parents. When I'm acting I'll do some little thing I've remembered, so simple." At the theatre she appeared in over 500 plays and in 1941 the comedian George Formby, on a visit to the theatre, recommended her to Michael Balcon at Ealing Film Studios. Put under contract she first appeared in The Black Sheep of Whitehall (1941) with Will Hay and a string of comedy films and dramas followed. In the same vein as the saucy seaside postcards of her Morecambe birth, Hird was usually cast as the all-seeing boarding house landlady, a gossiping neighbour or a sharp tongued mother in law. In the 1950s Hird was under contract to the Rank Organisation and was established as a major character actress. She worked with some of Britain's finest directors including Herbert Wilcox, Lewis Gilbert and John Schlesinger but by her own account was not easily awed. "I've appeared in hundreds of films and television things, and in some cases I literally mean 'appeared' around the door, that was all. Like anybody earning a liviNg, I took most of the work that came along." She gave outstanding performances in Simon and Laura (1955) and The Entertainer (1960), opposite Laurence Olivier, but one of her best remembered roles was that of the monstrous TV-addicted mother in A Kind of Loving (1962). As her career progressed she frequently returned to the stage, often in comedies with comedians such as Arthur Askey and Harry Secombe, and in 1964 she was memorably team with the comedian Freddie Frinton in the tv series Meet The Wife. She starred in a succession of hit TV comedies throughout the 70s and 80s but proof of her talent as a straight actress came in 1987 when she starred in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologue, A Creamcracker under the Settee for which she won a BAFTA award. She wrote several volumes of autobiography including Scene and Hird and Not in the Diary and in 1995 was the subject of a South Bank Show (ITV) monograph. One of the show's contributors, the actor Alan Bates, said of her "Thora always had a grasp of her character immediately. She didn't have to work herself into a state to get it right. She is a naturally funny woman whose comedy is on the edge of tragedy. It's instinctive and very understanding of life itself."