by Stephen Vagg
Ingrid Pitt was born on 21 November and died on 23 November, so now is as good a time as ever to pay tribute to this magnificent performer, who never quite became the star she should have been, though she became beloved in her lifetime and left behind several iconic performances, notably The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula.
She was Polish, born Ingoushka Petrov in Warsaw in 1937 to a German father and Polish-Jewish mother; during the war mother and daughter were imprisoned in a concentration camp for three years, but managed to escape with the help of partisans, with whom they lived for a year. Ingoushka wound up in East Berlin, studying theatre with the widow of Bertold Brecht, and eventually escaped to the west, in part with the help of an American solider, Roland Pitt, who she later briefly married, eventually taking the name “Ingrid Pitt”.
Ingrid (as she was now known) lived in Spain for a few years, appearing in movies such as Dr Zhivago (1965) and Chimes at Midnight (1966), before relocating to London. She had the lead in a sci-fi effort The Omegans (1968), directed by Billy Wilder’s less talented brother, W Lee Wilder. But her breakthrough role was Where Eagles Dare (1968), arguably the greatest guys-on-a-mission war movie ever made; Pitt played a waitress/special agent helping Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.
This performance led Pitt to be cast in The Vampire Lovers (1970), Hammer’s version of Carmilla. It’s a hugely entertaining movie, led by Pitt’s balls-to-the-wall performance as a queer vampire, falling for Madeleine Smith, seducing Kate O’Mara, managing to be attractive, scary, and emphatic. It remains among the most iconic performance – if not the most iconic performance – by a female in Hammer horror, up there with Ursula Andrews in She and Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC.
The studio then put Pitt in Countess Dracula (1971), playing a murderous noble inspired by Elizabeth Bathory – not as fun a movie as The Vampire Lovers (it lacks energy and needed to be trashier) but Pitt is superb. Her casting meant that she could not star in the (poor) sequel to Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire (1971), and was replaced by (the not very good) Yutte Stensgaard. Pitt went over to Amicus Productions and was one of several names in the anthology The House That Dripped Blood (1971), shining in her role.
It had been a splendid twelve months for Pitt, who was poised to be the first great female horror star but then the momentum of her career shifted. She appeared as an alcoholic actress in Robert Hartford Davis’ Nobody Ordered Love (1972), which received a limited release (the film is lost today) and then… that was it for leads. No more in her career, not in features. Only two years after being in a huge hit. She was sexy, iconic, talented, charismatic… what happened?
Well, for starters, Hammer were not great at developing female stars; in the early 1970s, they tried to build up some new male stars to replace Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, names like Shane Briant and Ralph Bates, but the studio seemed to regard women as interchangeable. Pitt admittedly was offered a small part in Captain Kronos (1974) and turned it down because it was too small – but Hammer should really have been developing vehicles for her.
Another reason for Pitt’s failure to “come on” as a star was the fact that the whole British industry went into a slump from 1972 onwards, as American money pulled out – in hindsight, Pitt probably should have hotfooted it over to the States, like Susan George and Joan Collins – at the very least, she would have found work in exploitation films. However, she liked London and had a young family.
Pitt did play a support role in a classic, The Wicker Man (1973), her character taking a random nude bath; during filming she had a fling with producer Peter Snell, which reportedly annoyed husband George Pinches, head of the Rank cinema chain. There are theories that this affair led to Pitt’s unofficial blacklisting from producers who were afraid of incurring Pinches’ displeasure – and who knows, maybe there was something in it. Because, after The Wicker Man Pitt made no more features until 1982, when producer Euan Lloyd arranged for her to be cast in Who Dares Wins (1982) and then Wild Geese 2 (1985) – both were support parts.
Pitt was always busy – she did a heap of television and theatre, and became a prolific author of novels, scripts and journalism, including a regular column for Den of Geek. She remarried, loved engaging with fans and seemed to have a full diary until her death in 2010.
Yet one cannot help feeling that she was an underutilised asset of the British film industry in the early ‘70s – Hammer and Amicus were still going strong. It is easy to imagine Pitt in, say Vampire Circus, Fear in the Night, Satanic Rights of Dracula, other Amicus anthologies, or her own specially devised vehicles. Horror icons do not grow on trees, and few are/were more iconic than Ingrid Pitt.
