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Lotte Lenya 1898 - 1981

Lotte Lenya of New City, Rockland County, NY was born on October 18, 1898 at Penzing, in Vienna Austria, and died at age 83 years old on November 27, 1981 in New York, New York County. Lotte Lenya was buried on November 30, 1981 at Mt. Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, Rockland County.

Lotte Lenya

Karoline Wilhelmine Blamauer (Charlotte), Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer and her husband was Kurt Weill.

New City, Rockland County, NY 10956

October 18, 1898

Penzing, in Vienna, Austria

November 27, 1981

New York, New York County, New York, United States

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Lotte Lenya Lotte Lenya (1898 - 1981)

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Lotte Lenya's History: 1898 - 1981

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Introduction

Lotte Lenya Biography Born October 18, 1898 in Vienna-Penzing, Austria-Hungary [now Austria] Died November 27, 1981 in New York City, New York, USA (cancer) Birth Name Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer who is best remembered for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963). She was born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (at that time Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a working class family. Young Lenya was fond of dancing. In 1914 she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There she began using her stage name, Lotte Lenya. In Swizerland she studied classical dance, singing and acting and made her stage debut at the Schauspielhaus. In 1921 she moved to Berlin and blended in the city's cosmopolitan cultural milieu. In 1924 she met composer Kurt Weill, and they married in 1926. Lotte Lenya was the inspiration behind Weill's most popular hit 'Mack the Knife'. She performed in several productions of 'The Threepenny Opera', which became an important step in her acting career. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, Lotte Lenya escaped from the country. At the same time, being stressed by the circumstances of life, she divorced from Kurt Weil, to be reunited with him two years later. In 1935 both emigrated to the United States and remarried in 1937. After Kurt Weill's death, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill's music played in numerous productions worldwide. In 1957 she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of 'The Threepenny Opera'. Lotte Lenya shot to international fame with her portrayal of Contessa Magda Terbilli-Gozales, Vivien Leigh's friend in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). The role brought Lenya an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She gained additional fame after she appeared as Rosa Klebb, former head of operations for SMERSH/KGB, and now a sadistic Spectre agent with poisonous knife in her shoe, in From Russia with Love (1963). She died of cancer on November 27, 1981, in New York. She is entombed with Kurt Weill in a mausoleum, in Mount Repose Cemetery, in Haverstraw, New York, USA. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Shelokhonov She was in he film, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Then the role of Rosa Kleb in the film From Russia with Love, and the title role in Mutter Courage in Recklinghausen, She was Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret, the film The Appointment, and the Fortune Teller in a television production of Tennessee Williams' Camino Real. In 1969, she was honored by the West German government with the Order of Merit, First Class. In 1971 she appeared in a concert performance of Der Silbersee at the Holland Festival and played Mother Courage at the University of California/Irvine. Her last film appearance, as a masseuse in Semi-Tough with Burt Reynolds, is indicative of the creative and personal energy that characterized her life. She succumbed to cancer on 27 November 1981.
10/18

1898

Birthday

October 18, 1898

Birthdate

Penzing, in Vienna Austria

Birthplace

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Military Service

Lotte Lenye supported the war effort with performances for Voice of America and the Office of War Information.
Professional Career

Birth Name Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer who is best remembered for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963). She was born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (at that time Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a working class family. Young Lenya was fond of dancing. In 1914 she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There she began using her stage name, Lotte Lenya. In Swizerland she studied classical dance, singing and acting and made her stage debut at the Schauspielhaus. In 1921 she moved to Berlin and blended in the city's cosmopolitan cultural milieu. In 1924 she met composer Kurt Weill, and they married in 1926. Lotte Lenya was the inspiration behind Weill's most popular hit 'Mack the Knife'. She performed in several productions of 'The Threepenny Opera', which became an important step in her acting career. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, Lotte Lenya escaped from the country. At the same time, being stressed by the circumstances of life, she divorced from Kurt Weil, to be reunited with him two years later. In 1935 both emigrated to the United States and remarried in 1937. After Kurt Weill's death, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill's music played in numerous productions worldwide. In 1957 she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of 'The Threepenny Opera'.
Personal Life & Family

Lotte Lenya, a star of the German and American stage and films who championed the music of her husband, Kurt Weill, died in the Manhattan apartment of a friend last evening. She was 83 years old. Miss Lenya first attracted widespread attention in the 1928 Berlin production of Bertolt Brecht's and Weill's ''Threepenny Opera,'' and her fame was confirmed in the film version of 1931. Her stage career in this country was limited until after Weill's death in 1950. But with the 1954 Off Broadway revival of ''The Threepenny Opera'' she became a noted figure in the United States, subsequently appearing in numerous works of both Weill and Brecht as well as supervising and singing in a series of Weill recordings that inspired the present-day re-evaluation of his work. She also made a name for herself, independently of Weill, winning a Tony Award for her performance in ''Cabaret'' on Broadway and an Oscar for the film ''The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.'' By the late 50's, Miss Lenya had become a ubiquitous symbol of the spirit, toughness and insouciance of Germany between the world wars. She and ''The Threepenny Opera'' properly came to represent all that was bright, glittering, sharp and trenchant about the art and the popular culture of Weimar Berlin. Vulnerability and Defiance As a singer, Miss Lenya had her distinct technical limitations, especially in her later years, when she lowered the pitch and approximated the line of Weill's songs. In a review in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg described her voice as one that ''could sandpaper sandpaper.'' But through her shaky failings, or perhaps even because of them, she projected an individuality, a vulnerability and a defiance that her more technically adroit successors were hard put to match. Lotte Lenya, whose original name was Karoline Blamauer, was born on Oct. 18, 1898, in Penzing, a working-class suburb of Vienna. Her mother was a laundress and her father one of the city's coachmen. From the very beginning, she was a performer: ''When she was only a baby, her father would summon her from the coal bin where she slept and make her dance for him,'' one press interview reported. Her first professional experience came at the age of 6, when she appeared in a local circus, and two years later she learned to walk a tightrope. During World War I, she was sent to live with an aunt in Zurich. She took dance classes in the local City Theater and joined its corps de ballet, and she also played small roles in operettas. ''Lotte Lenya'' was a stage name derived from her nickname, Lenja, and all her life she preferred to be called Lenja or Lenya by her friends. In 1920, she went to Berlin, then the theatrical capital of the German-speaking world, and joined a small company devoted to Shakespeare. Two years later there was an audition for a children's ballet called ''Die Zaubernacht.'' She was offered a part but turned it down when her teacher was refused a role. The composer of ''Die Zaubernacht'' was Kurt Weill, although she did not meet him then. By this time she had become a protegee of the German playwright Georg Kaiser and his wife, and it was through them, in 1924, that she finally met Weill. She was asked by Kaiser to row across a lake and pick up the composer, who was a houseguest. Miss Lenya asked how she would recognize him. The answer was, ''All composers look alike.'' Married to Weill in 1926 A romance soon developed between the two, and they were married in 1926. The Lotte Lenya of that time, as she appears in photographs, was a spunky, gamin-like creature: not beautiful in a conventional sense, but full of the sweet-and-sour personality that was soon to serve her so well on the stage. The first Brecht-Weill collaboration was the short ''Songspiel,'' now known as the ''Little Mahagonny,'' in which Miss Lenya had a part. Composed for the 1927 Baden-Baden Festival of avant-garde music, it had a controversial success and led to their work on ''The Threepenny Opera.'' The anecdotes surrounding the premiere of that work, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on Aug. 31, 1928, have passed into theatrical history. The performance was preceded by a temper tantrum by Weill, who had noticed the omission of his wife's name from the program. ''Pigsty,'' he cried. ''This is a pigsty. My wife won't go on! I won't allow it.'' Miss Lenya later told The New York Times Magazine that she calmed him by saying, ''They'll know who I am tomorrow.'' They did. ''The Threepenny Opera,'' with its blend of classical formalism, jazz atmosphere and defiantly proletarian simplicity, became the hit of Europe. It ran for five years in Berlin, until 1933, and was produced all over Germany and the rest of the Western world. Altogether, by one estimate, it received some 4,000 performances in 120 productions. 'Pirate Jenny' Her Anthem In the original version, Miss Lenya played the part of Jenny, but had only one song to sing. Her ''Solomon Song'' was cut because the show seemed too long, and the ''Pirate Jenny'' song was Polly's. In the film, however, from which Brecht eventually withdrew, Miss Lenya - who had also sung the role of Lucy in some stage performances - took over ''Pirate Jenny'' and made it her anthem. She subsequently appeared in the expanded, operatic version of ''Mahagonny,'' ''The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,'' and in a piece called ''Song of Hoboken'' in 1932. When the Nazis came to power, she and Weill, who was Jewish, emigrated to Paris, where Brecht and Weill composed their only work written specifically for her, the drama-ballet ''The Seven Deadly Sins.'' According to Ronald Sanders, Weill's biographer, their marriage faltered during this period. But for personal or professional reasons they reconciled, and in 1935 they came to New York. Miss Lenya appeared in Max Reinhardt's production of ''The Eternal Road''; in concert versions of some of her husband's German works; in the Broadway play ''Candle in the Wind,'' and in the short-lived ''Firebrand of Florence,'' for which Weill composed the music. But her English was limited and she eventually abandoned her stage career. Preserving Weill's Work Weill's early death in 1950 changed things. At first she was desolate. ''When he died, I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out,'' she told The Times. But the next year Miss Lenya was remarried, to an editor named George Davis, who died in 1957. It was with his strong encouragement that she resumed her career and took up the task of restoring Weill's work to public consciousness. It was a task that became a mission, and it took up most of the rest of her life. ''I didn't think of making a new career,'' she recalled in a 1964 interview in The Times. ''I had my success in Germany and that was it. But my friends insisted it was my heritage, my duty to take care of his music. I realized that perhaps it was my job to continue, to bring the music out.'' That mission began with a concert performance in early 1951 at Town Hall of ''The Threepenny Opera.'' Later that year Miss Lenya returned to the stage, appearing as Socrates's wife in Maxwell Anderson's ''Barefoot in Athens''; Anderson had been a close collaborator and friend of Weill. But it was not until the Carmen Capalbo staging of Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of ''The Threepenny Opera'' opened at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village in 1954 that Miss Lenya's new American career was under way in earnest. The show was such a hit that, after it was forced to close because of a previous booking at the theater, it reopened there the next year and ran for nearly seven years, with Miss Lenya coming in and out of the cast. From the mid-50's, Miss Lenya led a full-scale revival of Weill's European work. She appeared in many productions, including a highly praised staging by the New York City Ballet of ''The Seven Deadly Sins''; she made a series of recordings for Columbia Masterworks, and she also worked in the cause of Brecht, in the show ''Brecht on Brecht,'' which toured widely. Her work for Weill had a catalytic effect on the rediscovery of his music, but her actual influence is now thought by many to have been partly a distortion. By concentrating on the European work in which she herself had appeared, she skewed historical appreciation back onto that period, to the detriment of Weill's American shows and operas. For the most part they are now rarely performed, although 'Street Scene'' is in the repertory of the New York City Opera. In addition, the increasing limitations of her singing voice led to a tradition in which the German scores are sung by cabaret-style singer-actors in transposed and approximated form. Weill was once quoted as saying that ''my melodies always come to my inner ear in Lenya's voice.'' But when the Metropolitan Opera staged ''Mahagonny'' in 1979 with Teresa Stratas as Jenny and a controlled and exact orchestral performance under James Levine, the classical side of Weill's heritage could be better appreciated. Still, it was Miss Lenya who had rekindled the flame and kept it alive. In 'From Russia With Love' Gradually, Miss Lenya's career apart from Weill began to blossom, although she tended to be typecast as a symbol of Weimar Germany. In 1966 she appeared as Fraulein Schneider in ''Cabaret.'' ''Miss Lenya has never been better, or if she has been, I don't believe it,'' wrote Walter Kerr in the The Times. Her films, apart from ''The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,'' included ''From Russia With Love,'' Roman Polanski's ''What?'' and ''Semi-Tough.'' Miss Lenya enjoyed playing parts not written by her first husband.''When I do a film that has nothing to do with Kurt Weill, then I am happy, I am on my own,'' she told The Times. ''But in a Kurt Weill work I am as nervous as a cat. A burden falls on my shoulders. I feel a crushing responsibility.'' ''I've been the widow of Kurt Weill,'' she added in 1966. ''Now I'm me!'' Miss Lenya's third husband, the painter Russell Detwiler, died in 1969. In her later years she remained active, overseeing Weill productions and socializing happily. She maintained a midtown Manhattan apartment and a country home in Rockland County that she and Weill had purchased with his profits from ''Lady in the Dark.'' Although she had planned to write an official Weill biography with Mr. Davis, she never did. But recently she gave access to her memorabilia to Gottfried Wagner, the composer's great-grandson, who is writing the biography. She won an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in the film ''The Roman Spring of Mrs.Stone.''
11/27

1981

Death

November 27, 1981

Death date

Cancer

Cause of death

New York, New York County, New York United States
Death location

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11/30

1981

Gravesite & Burial

November 30, 1981

Funeral date
Mt. Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, Rockland County, New York 10927, United States
Burial location
Obituary

Lotte Lenya Biography Meets Weill Lotte Lenya, née Karoline Wilhelmine Blamauer, was born in 1898 in Vienna to working-class parents. An early ambition to become a dancer led her in 1914 to Zurich, where she studied classical dance and the Dalcroze method and gained experience in the opera and ballet at the Stadttheater. During her audition for Zaubernacht in 1922, she was introduced to its composer, Kurt Weill, but couldn't see him at his position at the piano in the pit. In 1924, the leading German Expressionist dramatist, Georg Kaiser, re-introduced Lenya to his new collaborator, Kurt Weill. Two years later they married, and in 1927 Lenya sang the role of Jessie in Mahagonny (Songspiel) at the Baden-Baden Music Festival. Although her inimitable but untrained soprano voice already set her apart from the opera singers who comprised the rest of the cast, she did not achieve a secure position in Berlin's vibrant theatrical scene until she created the role of Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928. Thereafter, she enjoyed an active stage, recording, and film career; although her efforts centered on her husband's works, she also appeared on the legitimate stage in Berlin in such plays as Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen, Karlheinz Martin's historic production of Dantons Tod and Leopold Jessner's of Oedipus. In 1931, after all the opera houses in Berlin had rejected Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Weill simplified the role of Jenny so that Lenya could sing it in the production at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm. Although they were estranged at the time they fled Germany and soon to be divorced, in 1933 Weill composed the role of Anna I in Die sieben Todsünden for her. They were not reconciled until they departed for New York in September 1935; they remarried the following year. Lenya then played Miriam in The Eternal Road (1937), sang at the fashionable nightclub, Le Ruban Bleu, and toured with Helen Hayes in Maxwell Anderson's A Candle in the Wind (1942). After the success of Lady in the Dark, the Weills bought Brook House in Rockland County, New York. Lenya recorded six of Weill's songs on the Bost label, supported the war effort with performances for Voice of America and the Office of War Information. After Weill's death in 1950, Lenya, no longer confident of her talents, reluctantly agreed to appear in a memorial concert at Town Hall; its astounding success prompted nearly annual revivals until 1965. In 1951 she created a role on Broadway in Anderson's Barefoot in Athens and married the writer/editor George Davis. It was Davis who persuaded her to recreate the role of Jenny in Blitzstein's adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, first under Leonard Bernstein in a concert version at Brandeis in 1952 and then at the Theater de Lys in 1954, a performance which won her a Tony Award. For the rest of the decade, Lenya devoted herself almost exclusively to the Weill renaissance her performances had initiated. Although her tessitura was now almost an octave lower than it had been during the Twenties, she recorded Berlin Theater Songs, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Johnny Johnson, Happy End, Die Dreigroschenoper, Die sieben Todsünden, and American Theater Songs. She also returned to Germany to search for Weill's lost scores, to administer his copyrights, and to make her first stage and concert performances there since 1932. The shock of George Davis's sudden death at age 51 in 1957 only intensified Lenya's devotion to Weill's legacy. In 1962, she married artist Russell Detwiler, who died under tragic circumstances just seven years later at the age of 44. During the first two decades following Weill's death Lenya re-established her international career both as singer and actress in non-singing roles and as a specialist in Brechtian theater. In addition, she appeared in several television specials devoted to Weill's music, as well as the film, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. In close succession followed the revue Brecht on Brecht in New York, the role of Rosa Kleb in the film From Russia with Love, the title role in Mutter Courage in Recklinghausen, Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret, the film The Appointment, and the Fortune Teller in a television production of Tennessee Williams' Camino Real. In 1969, she was honored by the West German government with the Order of Merit, First Class. In 1971 she appeared in a concert performance of Der Silbersee at the Holland Festival and played Mother Courage at the University of California/Irvine. As late as 1975, at the age of 77, she planned to premiere a number of Weill's works at the Berlin Festival, a landmark in the continuing Weill revival, but illness forced an unfortunate cancellation. Her last film appearance, as a masseuse in Semi- Tough with Burt Reynolds, is indicative of the creative and personal energy that characterized her life until the final months before she succumbed to cancer on 27 November 1981. But even her last coherent moments had been devoted to Weill matters, as she embraced Teresa Stratas as her successor and entrusted the Kurt Weill Foundation established in 1962 with her unfinished mission, the protection and promotion of Kurt Weill's music.--Kim H. Kowalke

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Lotte Lenya lived 31 years longer than the average family member when died at the age of 83.

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27 Memories, Stories & Photos about Lotte

Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya and Burt Reynolds.

She played the masseuse in Burt's movie, "Semi-Tough."

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Lotte Lenya's shoes in "From Russia with Love.

Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya's shoes in "From Russia with Love.

A photo of Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya and Burt Reynolds

A photo of Lotte Lenya and Burt Reynolds in Semi-Tough

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

A photo of Lotte Lenya

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Amanda S. Stevenson

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08/15/2019

Lotte Lenya

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Lotte Lenya 1898 - 1981

Lotte Lenya's History: 1898 - 1981

Introduction

Birthday

Military Service

Professional Career

Personal Life & Family

Death

Gravesite & Burial

Obituary

27 Memories, Stories & Photos about Lotte

Lotte Lenya's Family Tree & Friends

Lotte Lenya's Family Tree

Lotte's Friends

Other Lenya Family Biographies