Celebrity Biographies
Kitty Carlisle
Kitty Carlisle Hart is a film and stage actress who became very popular in the United States because she hosted television shows. She gained enormous notoriety in the ’90s with the ‘To Tell the Truth’ contest. For the rest of the world, she will remain in memory of her leading role with the Marx brothers in A Night at the Opera . The actress passed away on April 18 at the age of 96. Her son, Christopher Hart, explained to the media that her mother had been in the hospital since last Christmas because she contracted pneumonia.
Born on September 3, 1910 in New Orleans (Louisiana), Catherine Conn –her real name– belonged to a Jewish family of German origin. Her father, a renowned gynecologist, passed away when she was ten years old, and her mother moved to various European countries, because she intended to marry an aristocrat or a member of royalty. The young Kitty received an exquisite education, coming to study singing at the Theater de l’Atelier in Paris.
He made his stage debut in the early 1930s, performing musicals and operettas. He made his film debut with an important role in The Vanities Murder , an intrigue film, with musical sequences, directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Victor McLaglen . Next, Ella Carlisle starred in Ella she Loves Me Not and Here is My Heart , both with Bing Crosby . His most remembered work was A Night at the Opera , by Sam Wood, where she played Rosa Castaldi, an opera singer who becomes the center of interest of the arrogant tenor Rodolfo Lassparri, but she ends up falling in love with Ricardo Baroni, an unknown singer. The legendary film included several of the best-known numbers of the Marx brothers, such as the one in the cabin, and the one of “the contracting party of the first part”.
In 1946, the actress married the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Moss Hart , author of the works on which the films Live As You Want and The Man Who Came to Dinner are based , and screenwriter of titles such as The Invisible Barrier , He Is Born A Star and Broadway Melody . She had two children with him and they remained together until Hart’s death in 1961.
Kitty Carlisle made an occasional appearance on the movies, in films like Radio Days and Six Degrees of Separation . However, at the end of her life she concentrated on television.