Lotte Lenya

Lotte Lenya (October 18, 1898 - November 27, 1981), singer and actor, born Karoline Wilhelmine Blamauer, in Vienna, Austria.

As a child of working class parents, Lenya wanted to be a dancer. She moved to study in Zurich, Switzerland in 1914, taking up her first job at the Schauspielhaus. She moved to seek work in Berlin, Germany in 1921, where the following year she was seen by her future husband, the German composer Kurt Weill during an audition, although they did not meet properly until 1924, marrying him for the first time in 1926.

After she accepted the part of Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, she was accepted into the local stage community and performed in a variety of musicals, especially those of Weill and his collaborator Bertolt Brecht. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, and being Jewish, and having become estranged from Weill, Lenya fled to Paris, France in March 1933, then on to the United States of America. She divorced Weill in 1933, and remarried him in 1937: he died in 1950.

During World War II Lenya sang on stage and performed on Voice of America. After being coaxed back on stage after her husband's death, she appeared on Broadway in Barefoot in Athens and married writer George Davis. In 1954 she won a Tony Award for her role as Jenny in Marc Blitzstein's English version of Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera.

Lenya went on to record a number of songs from her time in Berlin, as well as songs from the American theatre, in a distinctive husky low voice. The combination of singing and speaking called sprechstimme was devised by Weill to accommodate her voice.

She was present in the studio when Louis Armstrong recorded Weill's "Mack the Knife". Armstrong improvised the line "Look out for Miss Lotte Lenya!" and added her name to the long list of Mack's female victims in the song for the English translation.

After 1957 death of George Davis, she married the artist Russell Detwiler in 1962, who died aged 44 in 1969.

Lenya appeared in a number of films, including:

• Pirate Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper (aka The threepenny opera) (1931)
• The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (movie) (1965) which won her a nomination for an Academy Award
• the part of the lesbian villain Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia With Love (movie) (1963)
• Emma Valadier in The appointment (movie) by Sidney Lumet (1969)
• the role of a masseuse in Semi-Tough (movie) (1977)

and in some TV Films like:

• Bertolt Brecht's Übungstücke für Schauspieler (aka Practice Pieces) (1964)
• Mutter Courage in Brecht's Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (aka Mother Courage and her children) (1965)
• The Gypsy in Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1966)

She was also the narrator in George Grosz' Interregnum (1960)

Lenya died in New York from cancer in 1981. She is entombed, with her first husband, in a mausoleum at the Mount Repose Cemetery, Haverstraw, New York.