One of the ongoing discussions about fiction is “how much can people tell the difference between fiction and reality”? As if that isn’t a developmental stage—I have a six-year-old who’s constantly asking me “is this fiction or nonfiction?” (In those words; he’s a bright kid.) Part of being human seems to be figuring out the difference between fiction and reality, and not being able to do that is proof that there’s something wrong in your brain. And I think part of the issue is that this century has had some incredible horrors and also had what I believe is the largest boom in horror fiction in the era of mass media. Ingrid Pitt, I discovered when I chose her, was smack in the middle of both.
She was born Ingoushka Petrov in Warsaw, Poland, in 1937. Her mother was of Jewish descent. And those facts will tell you exactly what horror she experienced in childhood. Her family spent three years in the Stutthof Concentration Camp. (Wikipedia, tantalizingly, says they “escaped,” but gives absolutely no details.) To have survived, and indeed to have survived as a child, is incredible. She would as an adult escape East Berlin as well, which is not nearly so horrific but still not a great time. She married an American solider, from whom she took her stage name of Pitt, and after their divorce, she went into acting.
Wherein she became, apparently, one of the most iconic Hammer Horror actresses. I’ve not seen a lot of Hammer films, for obvious reasons, but it’s my understanding that she’s one of the best-known of the Hammer actresses. Though she apparently had a hard time not laughing during the filming of one of the movies; it sounds as though she and the other actresses were having a good time on the set. She didn’t like watching horror movies, after what she’d lived through, but she even speculated that surviving it was what made her so good at it.
She also did five episodes of the old Doctor Who. She and her third husband, Tony Rudlin, were also hired to script a story arc, but it never made it on the air. Still, it proves that she did more than just Hammer; she even did some of the made-for-TV miniseries of Smiley’s People, and her first film role was as an extra in Doctor Zhivago. Horror is just where she became most well known, I suppose. She didn’t mind it, and she seemed quite fond of her fans, too.
She did writing, as well, including of course an autobiography about her experiences in World War II. And at some point, I should definitely watch “Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest,” the animated short she narrated about her childhood. And maybe read one of her books, though I believe she herself admitted that not all her writing was good. Still, Ingrid Pitt is one of those people about whom I knew essentially nothing and am pleased to have learned more from writing the column. To be perfectly honest, it’s one of the great joys of writing this column.
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