Lotte Lenya

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 1922 Lenya was seen by her future husband, German composer Kurt Weill, during an audition for his first stage score Zaubernacht but because of his position behind the piano, she did not see him. She was cast but owing to her loyalty to her voice coach she declined the role.

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.

Lotte Lenya got married with the composer Kurt Weill in 1926. When her husband went to Paris after the rise of the National Socialists their marriage ended. But she returned to Kurt Weill in 1935 and they both emigrated via England to the USA where they got married again.

Lenya, as the wife of famous composer Kurt Weill, would often star in his operas and musicals. At the world premiere of his "Threepenny Opera" in 1928, her name was inadvertently left out of the program guide, despite her playing the female lead.

Lenya appears in the Pabst 1931 German film version of the Brecht/Weill play with music, The Threepenny Opera, recreating the role that brought her fame in 1928, Jenny.

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.

Was cast in Vosstaniye rybakov (1934) as Maria the prostitute when that film originally went into production in 1931. Sets were constructed and the cast arrived at the Yalta location, but due to financial difficulties and supply interruptions (for instance, the typing paper intended for the scripts was used by the crew as rolling paper for their cigarettes), the production was disbanded with no footage shot. The role was eventually played by Vera Yanukova.

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.

During the summer of 1936, Weill, Lenya, Paul Green and Cheryl Crawford rented a house at 277 Trumbull Avenue in Nichols, Connecticut, about two miles from Pine Brook Country Club, the summer rehearsal headquarters of the Group Theatre. Here, Green and Weill wrote the screenplay and music for the controversial Broadway play Johnny Johnson, which was titled after the most frequently occurring name on the American casualty list of World War I. During this period Lenya had a love affair with playwright Paul Green.

Lenya made her debut as a nightclub singer at Le Ruban Bleu in New York, beginning on April 7, 1938. On October 22, 1941, she opened in the play Candle in the Wind on Broadway. It ran 95 performances.

After a badly received part in her husband's musical The Firebrand of Florence in 1945 in New York, she withdrew from the stage.

After Kurt Weill's death in 1950, Lotte, no longer confident of her talent, reluctantly agreed to appear in a memorial concert at Town Hall. The concert was such a huge success that it prompted annual revivals until 1965. She also spent the rest of her life dedicated to keeping Kurt's music alive through exhaustive searches of lost work, administering copyrights and, of course, her legendary concerts.

Lenya's second husband (1951-57) was American editor George Davis. After Davis' death in 1957, she married artist Russell Detwiler in 1962. He was 26 years her junior but she was widowed for a third time when Detwiler died at the age of 44 in 1969.

Awarded a Tony in 1956 for Supporting Actress in Marc Blitzstein's version of "The Threepenny Opera".

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.

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 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).

In 1966, Lenya originated the role of Fräulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of the musical Cabaret.

Donovan's 1968 song "Laleña" was inspired by Lenya.

Her final theatrical appearance came with another run in The Threepenny Opera at Florida State University in Tallahassee in April 1972.

In 1979, two years before her death, Lotte Lenya was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 490-492. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.

In 2007, the musical LoveMusik, based on Lenya's relationship with Weill, opened on Broadway. Lenya was portrayed by Donna Murphy.[.