Ingrid Pitt (born Ingrid Küttner; 21 November 1937 – 23 November 2010) was a Polish and British actress and writer. She was best known for her work in British horror cinema of the 1970s.
Ingrid Küttner was born in Berlin to Berthold Ernst Edmund Küttner (3 March 1870, Potsdam - 16 July 1953, Berlin) and Käthe Schweinfurth (1902-1986) one of two daughters, to a German father of Russian descent and a mother of Polish Jewish descent.
During World War II, she and her mother were imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp in Sztutowo, near Danzig, annexed to Nazi Germany (present-day Nowy Dwór County, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland) but escaped.
In West Berlin, in the 1950s, Ingoushka married an American soldier, Laud Roland Pitt Jr., and moved to California. After her marriage ended, she returned to Europe, where she took a small role in a film and adopted the stage name "Ingrid Pitt". She headed to Hollywood, where she worked as a waitress while trying to make a career in films.
In the early 1960s, Pitt was a member of the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin, under the guidance of Bertolt Brecht's widow Helene Weigel. In 1965, she made her film debut in Doctor Zhivago, playing a minor role. In 1968, she co-starred in the low-budget science fiction film The Omegans, and in the same year, played British spy Heidi Schmidt in Where Eagles Dare opposite Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.
Pitt appeared as Queen Galleia of Atlantis in The Time Monster, which was the fifth serial of the ninth season of Doctor Who, broadcast in six weekly parts, from 20 May through 24 June 1972. She returned to Doctor Who as Dr Solow in Warriors of the Deep, which was the first serial of the 21st season of the series, broadcast in four twice-weekly parts from 5 to 13 January 1984. Pitt also appears in the second broadcast episode of the short-lived cult ITC series The Zoo Gang, "Mindless Murder" (12 April 1974).
Her work with Hammer Film Productions elevated her to cult figure status. She starred as Carmilla/Mircalla in The Vampire Lovers (1970), based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, and played the title role in Countess Dracula (1971), based on the legends about Countess Elizabeth Báthory. Pitt also appeared in the Amicus horror anthology film The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and had a small part in The Wicker Man (1973). It has been argued that "she never quite became the star she should have been."
In the mid-1970s, she appeared on the judging panel of the British ITV talent show New Faces.
During the 1980s, Pitt returned to mainstream films and television. In the 1981 BBC Playhouse production, Unity, her character, Fraulein Baum, who is denounced as a Jew by Unity Mitford (Lesley-Anne Down), was close to her real-life experience. Her popularity with horror film buffs kept her in demand for guest appearances at horror conventions and film festivals. Other films in which Pitt has appeared outside the horror genre are: Who Dares Wins (1982) (or The Final Option), Wild Geese II (1985) and Hanna's War (1988). Generally cast as a villainess, her characters often died horribly at the end of the final reel. "Being the anti-hero is great – they are always roles you can get your teeth into."
At this time, the theatre world also beckoned. Pitt founded her own theatrical touring company and starred in successful stage productions of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic, Dial M for Murder, Duty Free (or Don't Bother to Dress), and Woman of Straw. She also appeared in many television series in the United Kingdom and the United States; among them Ironside, Dundee and the Culhane and Smiley's People.
In 1998, Pitt narrated Cradle of Filth's album Cruelty and the Beast as the character Countess Elizabeth Báthory, whom she had portrayed in the film Countess Dracula.
In 2000, Pitt returned to the big screen in The Asylum, starring Colin Baker and Patrick Mower, and directed by John Stewart. In 2003, Pitt voiced the role of Lady Violator in Renga Media's production Dominator. The film was the United Kingdom's first computer-generated imagery animated film.
After a period of illness, Pitt returned to the screen for the Hammer Films-Mario Bava tribute Sea of Dust (2008).
Pitt was also supposed to have a cameo role in Beyond the Rave (2008) as the unnamed mother of the drug dealer character Tooley played by Steve Sweeney. This horror serial, which marked the return of Hammer Films, was posted on the website MySpace, had Pitt's cameo scene filmed for episode 3, but it was omitted in the final cut. Despite this, Pitt was mistakenly listed in the credits for the episode as "Tooley's mum" as if she was still in it. The scene is included as an extra on the DVD.
Ingrid Pitt's first book, after a number of ill-fated tracts on the plight of Native Americans, was the 1980 novel, Cuckoo Run, a spy story about mistaken identity. "I took it to Cubby Broccoli. It was about a woman called Nina Dalton who is pursued across South America in the mistaken belief that she is a spy. Cubby said it was a female Bond. He was being very kind."
This was followed in 1984 by a novel of the Perón era in Argentina (The Perons), where she lived for a number of years: "Argentina was a wild frontier country ruled by a berserk military dictatorship at the time. It just suited my mood."
In 1984, Pitt and her husband Tony Rudlin were commissioned to script a Doctor Who adventure. The story, entitled The Macro Men, was one of a number of ideas submitted by the couple after she appeared in the season 21 story Warriors of the Deep (1984). The plot concerned events surrounding the Philadelphia Experiment—the urban legend about a U.S. Navy experiment during World War II to try to make the destroyer escort, USS Eldridge, invisible to radar. Pitt and Rudlin had read it in The Philadelphia Experiment – Project Invisibility (1979) by paranormal writer Charles Berlitz, grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools. It involved the Doctor (Colin Baker) and companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) arriving on board the ship in 1943 in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and becoming involved in a battle against microscopic humanoid creatures native to Earth, but previously unknown to humankind. The couple had several meetings with script editor Eric Saward and carried out numerous revisions, but the story progressed no further than the preparation of a draft first-episode script under the new title "The Macros". The story was released in June 2010 by Big Finish Productions as "The Macros" in their Doctor Who: The Lost Stories audios, five months before Pitt's death.
In 1999, her autobiography, Life's a Scream (Heinemann) was published, and she was short-listed for the Talkies Awards for her own reading of extracts from the audiobook, I Hate Being Second.