GRACIE FIELDS EARNS £25,000

Evening Star, Issue 21285, 14 December 1932, Page 9

GRACIE FIELDS EARNS £25,000

SIX WEEKS' WORK IN FILM LONDON, October 2. Grade Fields will make at least £25,000 out of her latest British talkie, ‘Looking on the Bright Side,* which has just had its preliminary release. This is a world’s record. Not even Hollywood’s greatest stars get as much as this for one picture. Thus are Greta Garbo, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Deitnch, Joan Crawford, and the rest of the celluloid kings and queens eclipsed by a Lancashire girl who only a few years ago was singing in the gutter outside an actors’ boarding house in Rochdale, her native town. She hoped that some actor would hear her and give her a job. One of them did. She secured the longed-for job was promptly fired, and became a factory hand. Now the drab side of Rochdale has been transformed into the bright side of Wardour street. The agreement governing her engagement —about six weeks’ work —for the talkie ‘ Looking on the Bright Side,’ gives her 50 per cent, of the profits made by the picture. Cinema proprietors were clamouring to book it even before the film was trade shown. Every hour the potential takings leapt by hundreds of pounds. Tlie total booking now represent a gross income of about £IOO,OOO. After thp cost of the production and various distribution expenses have been deducted the profits will be in the neighbourhood of £50.000 to £60,000. Half of that goes to Grncie Fields. Eh, lad, it’s a lot of brass.