A page from an autograph album signed with a fountain pen by Gracie Fields (1898-1979), the English-born, later Italian-based actress, singer and comedienne and star of both cinema and music hall. Her professional debut in variety took place at the Rochdale Hippodrome theatre in 1910 and she soon gave up her job in the local cotton mill, where she was a half-timer, spending half a week in the mill and the other half at school. She met comedian and impresario Archie Pitt and they began working together. Pitt gave Fields champagne on her 18th birthday, and wrote in her autograph book that he would make her a star. Pitt would come to serve as her manager and the two married in 1923 at Clapham Registry Office. Their first revue in 1915 was called Yes I Think So and the two continued to tour Britain together until 1924 in the revue Mr Tower of London. Fields came to major public notice when Mr Tower of London came to the West End, and her career rapidly accelerated from this point with straight dramatic performances and the beginning of a recording career. She made the first of ten appearances in Royal Variety Performances in 1928, following a premiere stint at the London Palladium, gaining a devoted following with a mixture of self-deprecating jokes, comic songs and monologues, as well as cheerful "depression-era" songs all presented in a "no-airs-and-graces" Northern, working class style. Fields had a great rapport with her audience, which  helped her become one of Britain's highest paid performers, playing to sold out theatres across the country. Her most famous song, which became her theme, "Sally," was worked into the title of her first film, Sally in Our Alley (1931), which was a major box office hit. She went on to make several films initially in Britain and later in the United States (for which she was paid a record fee of £200,000 for four films). Ironically, the final few lines of the song "Sally" were written by her husband's mistress, Annie Lipman, and Fields sang this song at nearly every performance she made from 1931 onwards - claiming in later life that she wanted to "Drown blasted Sally with Walter with the aspidistra on top!"