Celebrity Biographies
Ingrid Pitt
Her stunning beauty and air of a mysterious woman made her the ideal actress for vampire movies. Ingrid Pitt was one of the icons of the golden age of British horror in the 60s and 70s. Her films for the specialized horror production company Hammer Films made her very popular around the world. The actress herself died on November 23, 2010 at the age of 76 after suffering a cardiovascular collapse when she was on her way to a birthday dinner for her.
Ingoushka Petrov – real name of the actress – did not have an easy life. Born on November 21, 1937 in Poland, to a German father and a Polish-Jewish mother, during World War II her family was sent to a Nazi concentration camp when she was only 5 years old.
Although he survived the war, he ended up in the communist zone of Berlin, from where he managed to escape. She was aided by an American soldier stationed in Germany who would become her husband. She with him she went to California, but she separated from her right away, and she tried to make her way in Hollywood, where she agreed to work as a waitress while she sought to get a hole as an actress. She started out with small roles in movies like Golfus de Roma .
She spent a season in Spain where she was an extra in Doctor Zhivago , Campanadas a midnight and even played a “foreigner” who aroused the admiration of Manolo Escobar himself , in Un beso en el puerto . “Manolo behaved like the perfect Spanish gentleman,” declared the actress. Also in Spain, she made her horror film debut in El sonido de la muerte , by the great José Antonio Nieves Conde .
He also had a small role in Dare of the Eagles , a war film with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton . But her great opportunity was given to her by Roy Ward Baker , as the protagonist of The Vampire Lovers , adaptation of “Carmilla”, by Sheridan Le Fanu , for Hammer Films, where she was a vampire as seductive as she was horrifying. Another similar role made her one of the favorite actresses of the unconditional fans of the genre, the protagonist of Countess Dracula , based on Elizabeth Báthory, a woman who delayed the effects of aging by bathing in the blood of young maidens.
Ingrid Pitt also participated in Mansion of Murders , an episodic film by Amicus, another British production company specializing in horror, and in The Wicker Man , another great success of the genre with Christopher Lee . The rest of her career focuses more on television, in series like Smiley’s People , although at the end of her life she was recruited for B-series horror movies, like Sea of Dust ., which was his last film appearance. In his last years of life, he attended numerous fan conventions of the genre, and published many macabre-themed books, such as “The Ingrid Pitt Book of Murder, Torture and Depravaty”, in which he narrated the “exploits” of dangerous guys like Joseph Mengele, Caligula or Ivan the terrible. She also wrote her autobiography.