Karen Akers

Karen Akers is an American actress and singer born on October 13, 1945, in New York City. Raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she is the daughter of Heinrick C. Orth-Pallavicini, an insurance consultant, and Mary Orth-Pallavicini, a hospital chaplain. Her father was European and her grandmother was Russian. Akers attended Manhattanville College and holds a degree from Hunter College. She is bilingual, performing in both English and French.

Akers began her professional career in 1970 performing in supper clubs in Washington. Her early stage work included an amateur production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris with The Arlington Players. In 1978, filmmaker Christian Blackwood invited her to Hamburg to tape a program for German television after seeing her perform. The resulting program, Karen Akers: A Voice From New York, was enthusiastically received at the Montreux Film Festival and later broadcast in the United States on PBS under the title Presenting Karen Akers.

Her Broadway debut came in 1982 in the original production of Nine, a musical directed by Tommy Tune and based on Federico Fellini's film 8½. Akers played Luisa Contini, the wife of film director Guido Contini, a role opposite Raúl Juliá. The production opened on May 9, 1982, and ran for 732 performances before closing on February 4, 1984. For her performance, Akers received a Theatre World Award. She was among three cast members nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, with the award ultimately going to fellow cast member Liliane Montevecchi.

In the mid-1980s, Akers expanded her work into film and solo performance. She appeared in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo in 1985 as a celluloid chanteuse, and later in Heartburn as the mistress of Jack Nicholson's character. During this period she also performed in the one-woman show An Evening With Karen Akers.

Akers returned to Broadway in Grand Hotel, a musical adaptation of the novel and film with a score by Robert Wright, George Forrest, and Maury Yeston. The production reunited her with director Tommy Tune as well as Nine cast members Liliane Montevecchi and Kathi Moss. Grand Hotel opened on November 12, 1989, and ran for 1,018 performances through April 19, 1992. Her Broadway career thus spanned the years 1982 to 1989.

Beyond the stage, Akers has maintained an active recording career. Her discography includes Presenting Karen Akers, released in 1981, followed by a self-titled album in 1982. Subsequent recordings include In A Very Unusual Way, Just Imagine, Under Paris Skies, Live from Rainbow and Stars, Feels Like Home, If We Only Have Love, Like It Was, and Simply Styne, released across several decades. Her 1991 album Unchained Melodies included a recording of Sooner or Later, a song written for Madonna by Stephen Sondheim the previous year. A DVD concert film, Karen Akers: On Stage at Wolf Trap, was released in 2005.

In her personal life, Akers married Jim Akers in 1968. The marriage produced two sons and ended in divorce. On September 19, 1993, she married Kevin Patrick Power, vice president of the satellite communications company Orion Network Systems, in a Roman Catholic ceremony at St. Paul's Chapel of Columbia University in New York. As of April 2000, Akers was residing in London.