Ingrid Pitt

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Ingrid Pitt (born Ingoushka Petrovna ; born November 21, 1937 in Warsaw , Poland ; † November 23, 2010 in London ) was a British actress and writer .

youth

The daughter of a German who fled to Poland with his Jewish-Polish wife from the German National Socialists temporarily lost her father at the age of two after he was arrested by the occupying forces. Pitt's mother then fled with the small child to the part of Poland occupied by Soviet troops, to Grodno (now part of Belarus ). The family later moved to Białystok, further west, to live with their maternal grandparents. When the Germans combed this region for Jews who had not yet been deported in 1942, the family was arrested. The grandparents perished in a concentration camp.

Pitt and her mother were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig . When the Red Army advanced west in the spring of 1945, Pitt and her mother were forced to join a death march . Both managed to flee and found shelter with Polish partisans . At the moment of liberation, Pitt was suffering from tuberculosis and her mother was sick with typhus . After the recovery, mother and daughter decided to travel to Berlin to look for the missing father.

Acting career

Ingoushka Petrovna became interested in acting and applied to Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in the east of the city. Ingrid Pitt said in her autobiography Life's a Scream , published in 1999, that before her career could even begin, she claims to have been hunted by the People's Police for making insubordinate statements and to have evaded the pursuers by leaping into the Spree . One of the three GI's alleged to have pulled them out of the water was US soldier Pitt, who was stationed in West Berlin. After six months they married and moved to a military camp in Fort Carson, Colorado . Her daughter Steffanie Pitt, who also became an actress, was born here.

First successes

Petrovna took the stage name Ingrid Pitt. While her husband was on duty in Vietnam , she went on a theater tour of the United States for the first time. In New York , she received training from Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and then went to Spain , where she performed a number of stage appearances at the National Theater in Madrid and first appeared in front of the camera in 1964. She made her film debut in the B-production El sonido de la muerte , a US-funded horror film about adventurers on a treasure hunt. Immediately afterwards, in the elaborate Boris Pasternak adaptation Doctor Schiwago, she performed a mini-appearance as a Russian woman wandering around on a refugee trail during the civil war. In the film Un beso en el puerto (A kiss in the harbor) she was given a leading role for the first time in 1965.

In 1966 Pitt went to Los Angeles, starred in the television series Dundee and the Culhane at the side of the British character star John Mills and then took on the female lead in the low-budget production The Omegans , directed by Billy Wilder's brother, in the Philippines W. Lee Wilder . At a party she met the stunt specialist Yakima Canutt , who placed the heavily indebted actress in a British production of the war film Agents Die Lonely , which was partly shot in the Austrian Alps . Her partners there were Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood .

Horror movies

Pitt then moved to England. With two films she advanced to the new horror film star of the London production company " Hammer Films ", which specializes in this genre : In Comtesse des Horens , Pitt embodied the eponymous Countess Elisabeth Bathory , who hopes for eternal youth by regularly bathing in the blood of virgins and in the end nevertheless disintegrates. In the show piece, Crypt of the Vampires , she took on three roles: the vampire- like Mircalla Karnstein and her ancestors named Marcilla and Carmilla. The terrible hustle and bustle of their main character is put to an end there with a beheading by Peter Cushing .

Pitt's career ended as quickly as it began. She settled in Argentina for a few years . Since the mid-1980s, Pitt concentrated on her work as a book author. In addition to her autobiography, the work "Katarina", published in 1986, is particularly noteworthy. In a (strongly autobiographical) novel, it is devoted to survival in the concentration camp. Since the turn of the millennium, Pitt was again active as a film actress.

Movies

Autobiography

  • Life's a scream: the autobiography of Ingrid Pitt . London: Heinemann, 1999

literature

  • Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 271.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ bbc.co.uk
personal data
SURNAME Pitt, Ingrid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Petrovna, Ingoushka; Petrov, Ingoushka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-British actress
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw , Poland
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 2010
Place of death London