TV Cream

Hall of Fame

PITT, Ingrid

pittWell, we won’t try and be clever here and claim she was actually a gifted musical comedienne or something. No, Ingrid Pitt was and is a walking definition of horror films, and that was and is a marvellous claim to fame in its own right. There was Who Dares Wins and Where Eagles Dare, of course (not to mention oddball jungle sci-fi The Omegans), but to have made such a huge mark on the nation’s consciousness with what, when you go and look, turns out to be only a handful of horror roles, is admission justification alone.

FINEST HOUR: Well of course, The Vampire Lovers, as Carmilla/Marcilla/Mircalla/Whatever. If the word ‘iconic’ didn’t come with a cliche health warning, we’d bung it down here.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Glenn Aylett

    May 30, 2020 at 12:29 pm

    The Vampire Lovers is a classic and perhaps Ingrid’s best role, but I do remember her playing a terrorist in William Bodie Rejoins The SAS( Who Dares Wins). Top actress and with a fantastic life story, survived a Nazi death camp, had to escape from East Berlin, and later a cricket correspondent for Wisden and a pilot. Why Ingrid was never selected as a Pussy Galore style Bond girl has beaten me.

  2. richardpd

    May 30, 2020 at 2:04 pm

    She was in Dr Who twice.

    • Glenn Aylett

      May 30, 2020 at 4:21 pm

      @richardpd, least said about Warriors Of The Deep the better, where she takes on a monster that’s so cheap it’s falling apart on the set. Yet otherwise everything was fine and dandy in Miss Pitt’s CV: Countess Dracula about real life vampire Countess Bathory is a fine film and she was excellent in the borderline lesbian vampire film The Vampire Lovers. Also hats off to Hammer for making such good films on a limited budget and pretending Hertfordshire was Hungary.

  3. richardpd

    May 30, 2020 at 11:58 pm

    Yes Warriors of the Deep had many problems, some of which were due to the BBC suddenly having to allocate studio space for the 1983 General Election coverage.

    I’ve seen her in a few Hammer films, which always have that near-unique feel Carry On Screaming managed to impressively re-create.

  4. Glenn Aylett

    October 23, 2021 at 11:26 am

    I like Ingrid as the barmaid Heidi in Where Eagles Dare and for all her role is small, she doesn’t get to shoot the Nazis like Mary Ure, it’s quite memorable. Yet horror was always Ingrid’s strong point and her two vampire films are cult classics.

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top