Ingrid Pitt & Her Extraordinary Life

By Jason Apuzzo. Ingrid Pitt, one of my favorite cult movie stars, sadly passed away yesterday at age 73.

Pitt became famous in the late 60s/early 70s as one of Hammer Films’ impossibly glamorous horror queens, appearing in films such as The Vampire Lovers, Countess Dracula and The Wicker Man – and, to this day, Pitt is still remembered as easily the sexiest vampire ever, a title she earned by way of The Vampire Lovers.

I first became familiar with Ingrid Pitt, (born ‘Ingoushka Petrov’) by way of her iconic role as ‘Heidi’ in the 1968 classic Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. Pitt’s turn in that film as the “pretty Alpine rose” and saucy double-agent Heidi was – and remains – the stuff that male dreams are made of. Oh my! No one made fighting the Nazis look more sexy and glamorous than Ingrid Pitt.

The unfortunately thing is that until I began reading the articles about her today, I hadn’t actually known much about her very dramatic and challenging life – nor how tragically ironic her casting in Where Eagles Dare was. I’ve posted this lengthy excerpt below from today’s UK Guardian:

UK Guardian

She was born Ingoushka Petrov in Poland to a Jewish mother and a German father who was a scientist and refused to work on the Nazis’ programme to develop rockets. Pitt was five when she and her mother were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, where they remained for three years. “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.”

When they were taken into a forest to be shot, Pitt and her mother managed to escape and were rescued by partisans. They spent the last year of the war living rough with the partisans, before making their way to Berlin. “I was born into the biggest horror show of the century, the brutalities of the Nazi regime,” said Pitt. “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.”

After a brief spell as a medical student, Pitt became a member of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theatre company. When she got into trouble for criticising the communist authorities, she made her escape to the west, aided by a US marine officer, Roland Pitt, whom she soon married. After living for a period on a military base in Colorado, she got a divorce and returned to Europe with her daughter, Steffanie.

During a few years in Spain, she appeared uncredited in several Spanish films and got work as an extra on David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (both in 1965). She was eventually given a leading role in the wretched low-budget sci-fi film The Omegans (1968), shot in the Philippines and directed by W Lee Wilder, the brother of Billy Wilder.

In the same year, Pitt landed the part of a German double agent posing as a cafe waitress in the popular second world war yarn, Where Eagles Dare. (“And who might you be, my pretty alpine rose?”, asks Richard Burton, dressed in a Nazi uniform in the film.) “I had to say I was German to get the role and I didn’t like that,” Pitt said. Most of the film’s interiors were shot at the MGM-British studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, and it was then that Pitt began her love affair with England. She later married the British former racing driver Tony Rudlin, with whom she settled in London. It was “the longest Pitt-stop of his career”, she once quipped.

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Read the rest of this article here. And you can read more about Ingrid Pitt, and see clips of her work (as well as an interview) here. Our condolences to her family. This pretty Alpine rose will certainly will be missed.

Posted on November 24th, 2010 at 11:52am.