[20th Century Photographer] — Gracie Fields

London: Radio Pictures, [Ca. 1930s]. Original B&W sepia-toned photograph issued as a postcard. 5.5 x 3.5 inches. Good. Some wear on surface. Made in Great Britain. Scarce. Dame Gracie Fields, DBE (born Grace Stansfield; 9 January 1898 - 27 September 1979) was an English actress, singer and comedian and star of both cinema and music hall. She spent the later part of her life on the isle of Capri, Italy. Fields was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to Entertainment in 1938, and in 1979, seven months before her death, she was invested as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. RKO Pictures was an American film production and distribution company. In its original incarnation, as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. (a subsidiary of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, aka: RKO) it was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA chief David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone. By the mid-1940s, the studio was under the control of investor Floyd Odlum. .