Ingrid Pitt

Who She Is

Ingrid Pitt was born Ingoushka Petrov in Warsaw on November 21, 1937, to a German father and a Jewish mother. Her parents were trying to flee toward Britain when her birth interrupted the journey, and mother and child were later caught by the Germans. When she was five, she and her mother were imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp. They survived the war.

The detailed story of how is her own, told in her 1999 autobiography Life’s a Scream and carried by her obituaries. As Pitt told it, she and her mother escaped from a forced march and spent a year hiding in the forest with partisans. No obituarist disputed her account, and for a child survivor’s testimony the honest form is to give it in her name. She connected that childhood directly to her career. “I think I first knew I wanted to act in the camp,” she said. “I used to lie on the straw and try and believe I was somewhere else.”

After the war she reached Berlin, briefly studied medicine by her own account, and joined the Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt Brecht’s company, working under his widow, Helene Weigel. Her outspoken criticism of the East German authorities drew police attention, and she fled west. As she told it, she escaped the police on her debut night by diving into the River Spree and was rescued by an American officer. That officer was Laud Roland Pitt Jr., whom she married. She moved with him to California and kept his surname professionally after the marriage ended; “Ingrid” was her own choice. She later married the British film executive George Pinches, and then the racing driver Tony Rudlin. Her daughter is Steffanie Pitt-Blake.

The Work, and What She Did in It

Her film career began in small Spanish productions and uncredited bits, including Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Chimes at Midnight. The breakthrough was Where Eagles Dare (1968), the wartime action film with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, in which she plays Heidi Schmidt, the double agent planted in the village inn. She was 31 when it opened, a working actress of a decade’s standing, and it led directly to Hammer taking her on.

The Vampire Lovers (1970), directed by Roy Ward Baker, was Hammer’s version of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla and the first film of the Karnstein trilogy. She is in neither of the sequels. Pitt plays the vampire under three names, Marcilla, Carmilla and Mircalla Karnstein, an aristocratic predator taken into two households in turn. In the first, General Spielsdorf’s, her victim is his niece, Laura (Pippa Steel). In the second, the Mortons’, it is the daughter, Emma (Madeline Smith). Peter Cushing’s Spielsdorf leads the hunt that ends with her staked in the Karnstein tomb. Pitt, 32 at release, played Carmilla with as much longing as menace. Hammer historian Marcus Hearn credited her with being “partly responsible for ushering in a bold and brazen era of sexually explicit horror films in the 1970s,” and described her as the first prominent female lead of a Hammer horror film.

In Countess Dracula (1971), directed by Peter Sasdy, she gives a genuine double performance as Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy: the ageing widowed countess and, after a servant girl’s blood splashes her skin and restores her youth, the “daughter” she impersonates in order to pursue the young Imre Tóth (Sandor Elès). As the effect fades she has to keep killing to sustain the deception, with Captain Dobi (Nigel Green) and her maid, Julie (Patience Collier), as accomplices. It is not a vampire film. There are no fangs and no Dracula; the title is a late epithet the villagers give her. The character is named for Ferenc Nádasdy, husband of the real Elizabeth Báthory, and the youth-from-blood idea is legend, not history. Báthory (1560 to 1614) was accused, with her servants, of torturing and killing girls. Her servants were tried and executed in 1611, but she was never tried and died confined at Čachtice Castle in 1614. The blood-bathing story appears in no contemporary record. It was first printed in 1729, more than a century after her death, and historians treat it as folklore. The film dramatises the legend.

The production left her with her defining grievance. Her accented voice was dubbed by another actress in post-production without her agreement, and she rated this as the film in which she did her best work. “I’m not ecstatic about the fact that they dubbed my voice,” she said. “With no reason as far as I was concerned. I had done Where Eagles Dare for MGM, Vampire Lovers and half a dozen American TV series… and nobody had ever complained.”

Her other two horror films of the period were not Hammer’s. Amicus’s The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Peter Duffell’s anthology written by Robert Bloch, closes with “The Cloak,” in which she is Carla Lynde, co-star of a vain horror actor (Jon Pertwee) who buys a genuine vampire’s cloak for the picture they are making. The segment is the anthology’s joke on itself, and Pitt plays the reveal: Carla was a vampire all along, and her fanged entrance from a coffin is the film’s signature image. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee star in other segments; she shares the film with them, not scenes. In Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), a British Lion film, she is the Librarian on Summerisle, who also handles the island’s register when Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie comes asking, while Christopher Lee presides as Lord Summerisle. It is a small, smiling, immovable part of the island’s polite conspiracy, all welcome and no help, and some of her material was cut from the original release and restored in later versions. Hardy said of her at her death: “She was a very attractive person in every sense… a perfectly good actress but a very decent person as well.”

Afterwards, television kept her visible. She appeared in Doctor Who twice, a decade apart: Queen Galleia of Atlantis in The Time Monster (1972), opposite Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, and Dr. Solow in Warriors of the Deep (1984), opposite Peter Davison. With Tony Rudlin she was commissioned to write a Doctor Who story, The Macros, which was never televised but was later produced on audio by Big Finish. She played Elvira opposite Alec Guinness in the BBC’s Smiley’s People (1982), and her later films included Who Dares Wins (1982), Wild Geese II (1985) and Hanna’s War (1988).

Cool Verified Facts

• Her Hammer filmography is exactly two titles. Her horror immortality rests on four films in four years, 1970 to 1973, for three companies.
• In 1998, at 60, she returned to the Countess on record, narrating in character as Elizabeth Báthory on Cradle of Filth’s concept album Cruelty and the Beast.
• Her last credit was her own testimony: she narrated the animated short Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest, about her childhood in the camp, completed shortly before her death and released in 2011.
• She was a working author: the novels Cuckoo Run (1980), The Perons (1984), Eva’s Spell (1985) and Katarina (1986), the horror companions The Ingrid Pitt Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers (1998) and The Ingrid Pitt Bedside Companion for Ghosthunters (1999), and The Ingrid Pitt Book of Murder, Torture and Depravity (2000).

Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes

She saw no contradiction between the childhood and the genre. “It’s very amazing that I do horror films when I had this awful childhood,” she said. “But maybe that’s why I’m good at it.”

She pushed Hammer for more, not less. In Life’s a Scream she recalled being unhappy with a bloodless murder scene in Countess Dracula and urging Sasdy to “hang the girl up by her feet, cut her open, and let the blood flow down… let her bathe in the girl’s blood!” So much for the reluctant scream queen.

She tended her own legend for four decades. She ran a touring theatre company, the Pitt of Horror fan site and columns for Den of Geek, and was a fixture of horror conventions. “It’s great meeting the fans,” she said. “They tell me that I am more beautiful now than when I was making films a quarter of a century ago. All lies, of course, but sweet.” Marcus Hearn called her “gloriously uninhibited,” and her daughter summed her up: “Anyone who knew my mother would say she was incredibly feisty and determined to make a good fist of everything she wanted to do.”

In November 2010 she collapsed on her way to a celebration of her birthday. She died in a south London hospital of heart failure on November 23, aged 73, two days after turning 73.

Why She Matters

Two Hammer films were enough for Ingrid Pitt to define an era. The Vampire Lovers remains the benchmark screen Carmilla, the female vampire as protagonist, desiring subject and monster at once rather than a male vampire’s accessory, and it helped open Hammer’s bolder 1970s. Countess Dracula gave her a double role she rightly counted as her best, even in someone else’s voice.

She is also the survivor who chose horror. No other Hammer star’s life contains Stutthof. Pitt never hid it, wrote about it, narrated a film about it in her final months, and tied the child’s camp game of believing she was somewhere else to the actress she became. She put that at the centre of her own story. And she stayed, building and maintaining the cult around those films herself, from the conventions to a Báthory narration at 60.

Related on Think Horror

• Peter Cushing
• Christopher Lee
• Hammer Films
• Horror Actors