November 23: Queen of the Vampires

Ingrid Pitt, a child survivor of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for three years who became what the British press called “the Queen of Scream” as an actress in horror movies, died at the age of 73 on this date in 2010. Pitt was the daughter of a Polish Jewish mother and a German father who were arrested trying to flee to England in 1937. After the war, she joined the Berliner Ensemble and worked with Helene Weigel (Bertolt Brecht’s widow), but Pitt’s outspoken criticism of East Germany’s communist system prompted the police to seek her arrest on the night of her stage debut in Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” To escape them, she jumped into the River Spree with her costume on and was rescued by an American lieutenant, whom she then married. In the 1970s she performed in several British horror films, and “her striking, barely clad screen presence and vampirical Middle European accent — it was her real accent — secured her an international cult following that seems likely to remain undead for years to come,” according to the New York Times’ Margalit Fox. Pitt also wrote wrote several books, including a memoir, Life’s a Scream (1999).
“I think it’s very amazing that I do horror films when I had this awful childhood. But maybe that’s why I’m good at it.” —Ingrid Pitt
In a 1970 interview Ingrid Pitt discusses her early life as bullfighter, race car driver, stuntwoman: