Ingrid Pitt - Biography

Ingrid Pitt (21 November 193723 November 2010) was an actress best known for her work in horror films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Background

Pitt was born Ingoushka Petrov in Warsaw, Poland to a German father of Russian descent and a Polish Jewish mother. During World War II she and her family were imprisoned in a concentration camp. She survived and in Berlin in the 1950s met and married an American soldier and ended up living in California. After her marriage failed, she returned to Europe but after a small role in a film, she headed to Hollywood where she worked as a waitress while trying to make a career in the movies. Her natural hair colour was brown, though she frequently lightened it to blonde.

Acting career

In the early 1960s Pitt was a member of the prestigious Berliner Ensemble, under the guidance of Bertolt Brecht's widow Helene Weigel. In 1965 she made her film debut in Doctor Zhivago, playing a minor role. In 1968 she co-starred in the low budget science fiction film The Omegans and in the same year played "Heidi" in Where Eagles Dare opposite Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.

It was her work with Hammer Film Productions that elevated her to cult figure status. She starred as "Carmilla/Mircalla" in The Vampire Lovers (1970), a film based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, and played the title role in Countess Dracula (1971), a film based on the legends around Countess Elizabeth Báthory. Pitt also appeared in the Amicus horror anthology film The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and had a small part in the film The Wicker Man (1973).

In the mid-1970s, she appeared on the judging panel of the British ITV talent show New Faces.

During the 1980s, Pitt returned to roles in mainstream films and on television. Her role as Fraulein Baum in the 1981 BBC Playhouse Unity, who is denounced as a Jew by Unity Mitford (played by Lesley-Anne Down, who had played her daughter in Countess Dracula), was uncomfortably close to her real-life experiences. Her popularity with horror film buffs saw her in demand for guest appearances at horror conventions and film festivals. Other films Pitt has appeared in outside the horror genre are: Who Dares Wins, (aka The Final Option), Wild Geese II, and Hanna's War. Generally cast as a 'baddie', she usually manages to get killed horribly at the end of the final reel. "Being the anti-hero is great – they are always roles you can get your teeth into."

It was at this time that the theatre world also beckoned. Pitt founded her own theatrical touring company and starred in successful productions of Dial M for Murder, Duty Free (aka Don't Bother to Dress), and Woman of Straw. She also appeared in many TV shows in the UK and US – Ironside, Dundee and the Culhane, Doctor Who (The Time Monster, Warriors of the Deep), Smiley's People, etc.

Pitt made her return to the big screen in the 2000 production The Asylum. The film starred Colin Baker and Patrick Mower, and was directed by John Stewart. In 2003, Pitt voiced the role of "Lady Violator" in Renga Media's production Dominator. The film was the UK's first CGI animated film.

After a period of illness, Pitt returned to the screen in 2006 for the Hammer Films-Mario Bava tribute, Sea of Dust. In 1998, Pitt narrated Cradle of Filth's "Cruelty and the Beast" album, although her narration was done strictly in-character as the Countess she portrayed in Countess Dracula.

Writing career

Pitt's first book, after a number of ill-fated tracts on the plight of the Native Americans, was a novel, Cuckoo Run, a spy story about mistaken identity. "I took it to Cubby Broccoli. It was about a woman called Nina Dalton who is pursued across South America in the mistaken belief that she is a spy. Cubby said it was a female Bond. He was being very kind."

This was followed in 1984 by a novelisation of the Peron era in Argentina ("The Perons"), where she lived for a number of years; "Argentina was a wild frontier country ruled by a berserk military dictatorship at the time. It just suited my mood."

In 1984, Pitt and her husband Tony Rudlin were commissioned to script a Doctor Who adventure. The story, entitled The Macro Men, was one of a number of ideas submitted by the couple, after she appeared in the season 21 DW story Warriors of the Deep. The plot concerned events surrounding the Philadelphia Experiment – a US military experiment during the Second World War to try to make the naval destroyer USS Eldridge invisible to radar – about which Pitt and Rudlin had read in a book entitled The Philadelphia Experiment by leading paranormal investigator Charles Berlitz. It involved the Doctor, and companion Peri, arriving on board the USS Eldridge in Philadelphia harbour in 1943 and becoming involved in a battle against microscopic humanoid creatures native to Earth but previously unknown to humankind. The writers had several meetings with script editor Eric Saward and carried out numerous revisions, but the story progressed no further than the preparation of a draft first episode script under the new title The Macros. The story has now been made by Big Finish in their Doctor Who: the Lost Stories audios, as The Macros.

In 1999, her autobiography, Life's a Scream (Heinemann) was published, and she was short-listed for the Talkies Awards for her own reading of extracts from the audio book, "I hate being second".

The autobiography detailed the harrowing experiences of her early life in a Nazi Concentration camp, her search throughout the European Red Cross Refugee Camps for her father, and her escape from East Berlin, one step ahead of the Volkspolizei. "I always had a big mouth and used to go on about the political schooling interrupting my quest for thespian glory. I used to think like that. Not good in a police state."

The Bedside Companion for Ghosthunters (Batsfords) was Pitt's tenth book. It was preceded by the Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers (Batsfords). The Ingrid Pitt Book Of Murder, Torture And Depravity was published in October 2000.

Pitt's credentials for writing about ghosts spring from a time when she lived for a while with a tribe of Indians in Colorado. Sitting with her baby daughter, Steffanie, by a log fire, she was sure that she could see the face of her father smiling at her in the flames. "I told one of the others and he went all Hollywood Injun on me and said something like 'Heap good medicine'. I guess he was taking the mickey."

Other writing projects include a different look at Hammer Films entitled The Hammer Xperience. She also wrote a story under the pen-name Dracula Smith, which was illustrated within the Fan club magazine, and is rumoured to be waiting to be snapped up for production.

Pitt wrote regular columns for various magazines and periodicals, including Shivers magazine, TV & Film Memorabilia and Motoring and Leisure. She also wrote a regular column, often about politics, on her official website, as well as a weekly column at UK website Den of Geek. In 2008, she was added to the merchandising of Monster-Mania: The Magazine.

Personal life

She married three times, first to Laud Roland Pitt Jr, an American GI; second to George Pinches, a British film executive; and then to Tony Rudlin, an actor and racing car driver. Her daughter, Steffanie Pitt-Blake, is also an actress.

Pitt had a passion for World War II aircraft. After revealing her passion on a radio programme, she was invited by the museum at RAF Duxford to have a flight in a Lancaster. She held a student's pilot licence and a black belt in karate.

Death

Pitt died in a south London hospital on 23 November 2010, a few days after collapsing, and two days after her 73rd birthday.

Legacy project

Seven months before she died, Pitt finished narration for "Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest," an animated short film on her experience in the Holocaust, a project that had been in the works for five years. Character design and storyboards were created by two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Bill Plympton. The film is directed by Kevin Sean Michaels; co-produced and co-written by Dr. Jud Newborn, Holocaust expert and author, "Sophie Scholl and the White Rose"; and drawn by 10-year-old animator, Perry Chen. The short film will be completed for release in 2011, with a feature-length documentary, also by Michaels, to follow.

Filmography

Bibliography (partial)

• Cuckoo Run (1980)
• The Perons (1984)
• Eva's Spell (1985)
• Katarina (1986)
• The Ingrid Pitt Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers (1998)
• The Autobiography of Ingrid Pitt : Life's A Scream (1999)
• Ingrid Pitt Bedside Companion for Ghosthunters (1999)
• The Ingrid Pitt Book of Murder, Torture and Depravity (2000)

External links

• Obituary in The Guardian
• Obituary in The Independent
• Pitt of Horror
• Ingrid Pitt: Beyond The Forest biopic
• Ingrid Pitt at HorrorStars
• Renga Media
• Weekly column at Den Of Geek