Lenya was born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (at that time Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a Roman-Catholic working class family of german descent. 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 (they married in 1926), the 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 teacher who was not, she declined the role. She accepted the part of Jenny in the first performance of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) in 1928 and the part became her breakthrough role. At the world premiere of the “Threepenny Opera” in 1928, her name was inadvertently left out of the program guide, despite her playing the female lead. 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 March, 1933, she fled to Paris, where she sang the leading part in Brecht-Weill’s “sung ballet”, The Seven Deadly Sins. In 1935 both emigrated to the United States and and settled in New York City on 10 September 1935. They remarried in 1937.
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| Lotte Lenya & Kurt Weill |
During the summer of 1936, Lenya, Paul Green, Cheryl Crawford and her husband rented an old house at 277 Trumbull Avenue in Nichols, Connecticut, about two miles from Pine Brook Country Club, which was the summer rehearsal headquarters of the Group Theatre. It was here that 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. It was also during this time that Lenya had her first American love affair with playwright Paul Green.
During World War II, Lenya did a number of stage performances, recordings and radio performances, including for the Voice of America. After a badly received part in her husband’s musical The Firebrand of Florence in 1945 in New York, she withdrew from the stage.
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| Lotte Lenya in “CABARET” (1966) |
After Kurt Weill’s death in 1950, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill’s music played in numerous productions worldwide. 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. In addition to her husband’s legacy, Lenya was also a specialist in Brechtian theatre. She appeared on Broadway in Barefoot in Athens and married influential American editor George Davis. In 1957 she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of ‘The Threepenny Opera’. After Davis’s death in 1957, she married the artist Russell Detwiler in 1962. He was 26 years her junior, but died at the age of 44 in 1969.
In 1956, Louis Armstrong recorded the song “Mack the Knife“, both as a solo number and as a duet with Lenya. Armstrong added Lenya’s name into the lyrics, in place of one the characters in the play. Other recordings of the song, most notably Bobby Darin‘s in 1959, have continued this tradition.
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.
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| Lotte Lenya in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” (1961) |
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| German Lobby Card (with wrong colouring) |
The role of sadistic Spectre agent Rosa Klebb (which is russian for bread) with a poisonous knife in her shoe was originally intended to be portrayed by a considerably “heavier” woman and Bond producers Broccoli and Saltzman were not convinced by Lotte Lenya who only weighed 50kg.
The costume department made the suggestion to just stuff her clothes for the shoot but Lenya firmly rejected the idea. “Let´s just forget the costume”, she said. “I will make myself look fatter and more ponderous.”
After appearing as Rosa Klebb in “From Russia with Love” (1963), some people looked at Lenyas shoes, when they first met her. Rosa Klebb’s shoe blade has been featured in other films: It is used by Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ichi in Ichi the Killer, James West in Wild Wild West and the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Her portrayal of Rosa Klebb became the inspiration for two other movie villains: Frau Farbissina (Mindy Sterling) in Austin Powers (1997) and Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls (2008).
Lotte Lenyas likeness was used for the 2005 Electronic Arts videogame “From Russia with Love”, a rather poor example in the James Bond Gaming sector that was met with only mediocre reviews.
In the 2010 reimagining of the video game GoldenEye 007, the weapon that was named “Klobb” in the original game (originally named after designer Ken Lobb) has had its name changed to “Klebb”. Klebb herself is also a playable character in the game’s multiplayer component.
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| Goldeneye Reloaded Screenshot |
Klebb was also included on the list of top ten Bond villains by The Times in 2008.
VIDEOS:
(IN ENGLISH)
LOTTE LENYA DOCUMENTARY
This special will return with…CLEMENS SCHICK
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