The Blackpool stages where star duo Julie Andrews and Richard Attenborough made their first appearances

Julie Andrews and Richard Attenborough are the most famous artists in week two of our A-Z series of stars who featured here in the 20th Century.

Julie, born in 1935, made BBC broadcasts with her mother and stepfather, Barbara and Ted Andrews, in 1946, and appeared in the 1948 Royal Variety Performance, billed Our Youngest Operatic Soprano.

In 1949 she was featured in the old Blackpool Hippodrome's summer show, as her parents were appearing at the resort's Central Pier.

A supporting spot in an Opera House Sunday concert in 1950 won her the Gazette review: "Undoubtedly a star of the future - her voice is startling in its maturity."

Then came a bill-topping week at the resort's Palace Theatre in April, 1951. Three years later she was on Broadway in Sandy Wilson's musical The Boy Friend.

After My Fair Lady and Camelot on the New York stage it was Hollywood fame for Julie in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.

In the year 2000 Honours List she became a DBE for services to the performing arts.

The Blackpool star role of Richard Attenborough (1923-2011) was at the Grand Theatre in February, 1943, as the young hoodlum, Pinkie, in the premiere of Grahame Greene's Brighton Rock.

A great screen career as actor and director and arts administrator lay ahead. He was knighted in 1976 and became a life peer in 1989.

A more typical Blackpool connection was that of Liverpool-born comedian Arthur Askey (1900-1982), who starred in six summer season shows, four at the Grand Theatre and two at the Opera House.

Arthur was a concert party comedian before radio fame with Richard Murdoch in Band Waggon. A stage version came to the Opera House for the 1940 summer season.

In the 1940s Arthur became a star of comedy films, musicals and variety, often visiting the resort. A Gazette reviewer noted: "Arthur's style . . . is the sort of effortless nonsense that only a great personality can achieve."

TV widened his audience and a new phase of his career brought him to the Grand in comedy plays like 1953's season of The Love Match, with Thora Hird, Glenn Melvyn and Danny Ross.

There were three more Grand comedy seasons before Arthur's last summer show, guesting with Val Doonican at the Opera House in 1969.

Music now with the variety star famous for her boogie woogie piano style. But Jamaica-born Winifred Atwell (1909-1994) a qualified pharmacist, arrived in London from Trinidad, in 1946, to further her training as a classical pianist.

There was more work to be had on the variety stage and on her week's visit to Blackpool's Palace Theatre in January, 1949, a Gazette reviewer noted: "Winifred Atwell reveals herself as a red hot momma of the piano."

Radio, television and recordings boosted her career and she starred in summer seasons at the resort's Hippodrome in 1953 and 58, the Central Pier in 1966 and the Queen's Theatre in 1970.

Winnie always stated her classical credentials with a piece by Grieg or Chopin on a "proper piano."

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