Olive Moorefield

Olive Moorefield, born August 23, 1932, in Pittsburgh, is an American actress and singer whose career spanned Broadway, European opera houses, film, and television across several decades.

Moorefield grew up as one of eight children and began music studies at age five. By age eight she was performing solos in church, and at sixteen she received a $4,000 scholarship from a Pittsburgh radio station to study opera. She attended Homestead High School before enrolling at Carnegie Institute of Technology, later transferring to the Pennsylvania College for Women. During her early years she supported herself through babysitting, stenography, and singing in nightclubs, and she also performed with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.

Her Broadway career began in 1952 when she appeared in the musical My Darlin' Aida at the Winter Garden Theatre. Following the close of that production, the US Information Service hired her to perform American folk songs and spirituals for military personnel stationed in Austria. Through the USIS she also appeared in productions of Carousel and Show Boat at a theater the organization operated in Vienna, and she used her time in the city to continue vocal studies and attend opera performances. An audition for Marcel Prawy led to her engagement at the Vienna Volksoper, where she sang the role of Bianca and subsequently Kate in Kiss Me Kate in 1956. A critic writing in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift described her as a "hurricane of vitality, high spirits and joy."

Moorefield's European stage work continued through the following decades. In 1964 she sang Laetitia in a German-language broadcast of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief for Bayerischer Rundfunk, a production conducted by Wolfgang Rennert and directed by Otto Schenk. The following year she portrayed Bess in a 1965 Volksoper staging of Porgy and Bess. In 1966 she released the album Kiss Me Kate alongside Peter Alexander, and that same year she played Jenny in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at the Oper Frankfurt, directed by Harry Buckwitz. She returned to the role of Jenny from Mahagonny at the Volksoper in 1973. In 1972, at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, she played Spelunken-Jenny in Brecht and Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper.

Beyond the stage, Moorefield appeared in more than twenty films between 1954 and 1976, including at least fifteen German and Viennese productions. In 1962 she became one of the first television stars in Germany, and her European television work included a starring role in Requiem für eine Nonne, an adaptation of William Faulkner's 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun. She also recorded German Schlager and performed in an Italian-language production of Kiss Me Kate for Italian television. In 2014, the American National Opera Association honored her with the "Lift Every Voice" Legacy Award.

In her personal life, Moorefield married Kurt Macht, a physician she met in Vienna while he was treating her for a throat condition. They have one son.