Lotte Lenya

Lotte Lenya, born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer on 18 October 1898 in Penzing, Austria-Hungary, was an Austrian-American singer, diseuse, and actress who became one of the most distinctive theatrical voices of the twentieth century. She died in Manhattan on 27 November 1981 at the age of 83 and is buried beside her first husband, composer Kurt Weill, at Mount Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, New York.

Lenya was born to Catholic working-class parents in Vienna and traveled to Zürich in 1914 to study, taking her first theatrical job at the Schauspielhaus under the stage name Lotte Lenja. She relocated to Berlin in 1921 to pursue further work. Her introduction to Weill came indirectly in 1922, when he observed her during an audition for his first stage score, Zaubernacht, though she did not see him from her position. She was offered a role but declined out of loyalty to her voice coach. The two did not meet properly until 1924, through the writer Georg Kaiser, and they married in 1926. Lenya's breakthrough came in 1928 when she originated the role of Jenny in the Berlin premiere of The Threepenny Opera, a performance that established her reputation in the German-speaking theatrical world. Throughout the final years of the Weimar Republic, she worked extensively in film, theatre, and Brecht-Weill productions, and made multiple recordings of Weill's songs.

The rise of Nazism prompted Lenya to leave Germany. In March 1933, she moved to Paris, where she performed the leading role in the Brecht-Weill sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. That same year she and Weill divorced, though they later reconciled after both emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City on 10 September 1935. They remarried in 1937. During the summer of 1936, Lenya, Weill, playwright Paul Green, and producer Cheryl Crawford shared a house in Nichols, Connecticut, near the Group Theatre's summer rehearsal base at Pine Brook Country Club, where Green and Weill developed the Broadway play Johnny Johnson. During World War II, Lenya contributed to stage performances, recordings, and radio broadcasts, including work for the Voice of America. A poorly received role in Weill's 1945 Broadway musical The Firebrand of Florence led her to withdraw from the stage. Following Weill's death in 1950, she was persuaded to return, appearing on Broadway in Barefoot in Athens and, later, in the drama Candle in the Wind.

Lenya's Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical came in 1956 for her portrayal of Jenny in Marc Blitzstein's English-language adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, making it the only off-Broadway production to have been recognized with that honor. She subsequently recorded songs from her Berlin years as well as material from the American stage. As her voice deepened with age, transpositions to lower keys were required for soprano parts in works such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins, and she drew increasingly on Sprechstimme to accommodate the changes in her range. She also founded the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music to manage rights, administer income, and promote knowledge of Weill's work. During the recording session at which Louis Armstrong taped "Mack the Knife," Armstrong improvised the line "Look out for Miss Lotte Lenya," inserting her name among Mack's female conquests; Bobby Darin's 1959 hit version of the song retained those updated lyrics.

In 1966, Lenya originated the role of Fräulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of the musical Cabaret, a production that marked the final chapter of her Broadway career, which had spanned from 1937 to 1966. Her film work during this period also brought significant recognition. She narrated George Grosz' Interregnum, a documentary about the artist George Grosz that received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short in 1960. Her performance as Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales, the earthy companion of Vivien Leigh's character in the Tennessee Williams adaptation The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), earned her both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress. In 1963, she was cast as SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia with Love, starring Sean Connery and Robert Shaw.

Lenya married four times after Weill's death. Her second husband, American editor George Davis, died in 1957 after a marriage lasting from 1951 to 1957. In 1962 she married artist Russell Detwiler, who was 26 years her junior; he died in 1969 at the age of 44 following a fall during an alcoholic seizure. On 9 June 1971 she married critic and television producer Richard Siemanowski, though the two separated within two years without having lived together. In 1979, two years before her death, Lenya was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.