Life was a scream Hammer horror favourite Ingrid Pitt dies aged 73 

Ingrid Pitt, Hammer horror’s favourite heroine, has died aged 73 in south London. The Polish-born actor, right, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp during the second world war, found fame as the blood-splattered, often blouseless star of films such as Countess Dracula, and The Vampire Lovers.

The Polish-born beauty Ingrid Pitt is one of a handful of actors whose names are virtually synonymous with Hammer Horror. In fact, she made only two Hammer films, as well as a few notable genre films such The House That Dripped Blood (Amicus, 1971) and The Wicker Man (1973, in a fleeting cameo).

Her first Hammer role was as the vampire Carmilla in The Vampire Lovers (1970), a role for which she gladly stripped off and met the demands of the movie-going public’s growing appetite for sex (and lesbian sex, at that). Her second and final Hammer film later that same year was in the title role of Countess Dracula, the less satisfying of the two films, despite Pitt’s sensual performance.

She relished being cast as predatory baddies, rather than innocent victims. Film historian Marcus Hearn, said: “She was partly responsible for ushering in a bold and brazen era of sexually explicitly horror films in the 1970s, but that should not denigrate her abilities.”

Steven Soderbergh gave her a late career boost when he cast her as a sinister aunt in his 1995 noir The Underneath. She also won fans as an author with an autobiography, Life’s a Scream, and three volumes of horror trivia, including 2000’s The Ingrid Pitt Book of Murder, Torture and Depravity.

sources:The Guardian

Ingrid Pitt at Dictionary of Hammer Horror