Ingrid Pitt in Where Eagles Dare (1968).
The late actress, Ingrid Pitt, gained a great deal of notoriety while starring in a number of 1970s horror films from Britain’s Hammer Film Productions and other studios. But no fictional movie could match the unthinkable, real-life horror she experienced as a child.
HOW DID SHE SURVIVE?
Ingrid Pitt (birth name Ingoushka Petrov) was born in 1937 in Warsaw, Poland. Her mother was a Polish Jew, her father a German of Russian ancestry.
During World War II Ingoushka and her mother were imprisoned by the Nazis in the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, Poland (now known as Gdansk). Despite unimaginable conditions they managed to survive for three years, when they finally escaped.
While living in Berlin in the 1950s, Ingoushka married an American soldier named Laud Roland Pitt, Jr. and moved with him to California. When the short-lived marriage ended, she returned to Europe and sought out small film roles under the stage name, Ingrid Pitt.
Time for a snack in The House that Dripped Blood.
A CULT FIGURE
In the 1960s Pitt returned to California and worked as a waitress while auditioning for screen roles. Her first feature film role was in the 1965 blockbuster, Doctor Zhivago, a small part, but a breakthrough. Then, in 1968, she portrayed a British spy in Where Eagles Dare, co-starring opposite Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.
Other film and television roles followed, including appearances on the long-running British series, Doctor Who. But she achieved her cult figure status as a Hammer horror queen in The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Countess Dracula (1971). She also appeared in The House that Dripped Blood (1971) from Britain’s Amicus Productions, and The Wicker Man (1973) from British Lion Films.
The Stutthof concentration camp is now a memorial museum.
Subsequently, Pitt became a popular figure at various film festivals and horror conventions. She continued acting for movies and television, the majority of her roles not in the horror genre. She also began writing, with about a dozen books to her credit, ranging from ghost stories (a fascination of hers) to the plight of Native Americans to her own autobiography, Life’s a Scream, where in part she documented her years in the concentration camp.
Ingrid Pitt, who led a remarkable life, passed away in London of congestive heart failure in 2010, two days after her 73rd birthday.