Ingrid Pitt (1937-2010)

You know it's not good news when the Radio 4 announcer begins the next item, " Ingrid Pitt, the female lead in many Hammer horror films has......." Well, it's not going to be good news is it?

Ingrid Pitt's rise to fame coincided with my early teen years and she was up there with Marilyn Monroe, Judy Geeson and the little known American actress Carol Lynley, as objects of adolescent desire. Pitt, whose heaving bosom and propensity for biting the necks of virgins, was an unusual pin-up in that her glamour and sexiness were sold as part of a larger package, unlike say Racquel Welch whose acting was very much an add-on to the sexy image, Pitt was first and foremost an actress who happened to find herself in the right place at the right time.

Pitt's early life and career are often overlooked as biographers tend to fast forward to the scenes of her in the bath or persuading the young Maddy Smith that her dress would look better if she were naked underneath. Trust me, it's difficult to write an appreciation of Miss Pitt without sounding like a middle aged perv. Pitt was from Poland originally and she actually survived being incarcerated in a concentration camp and having met one of the liberating G.I's on post war Berlin she headed west for California. There like a million other hopefuls over the years she worked in a cocktail bar and a cafe as she tried to make her way in the film industry. When that, and her marriage, failed, she headed back to Europe where she made appearances in Dr Zhivago and Where Eagles Dare, in the latter stealing the on-screen female objectification title from Mary Ure.

It was with Hammer that her career really took off and my interest in here, from those late Friday screenings of the films The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Hammer is currently enjoying a critical revival but I think it's fair to say that both those films were higher of kitsch and glamour then they were on acting talent. Pitts also appeared in a couple of Amicus films, Amicus a company whose legacy endures although they are often overlooked when British horror films of the 1960's and 1970's are recalled.

After the horror film career ended, she also appeared in the cult horror The Wicker Man most memorably naked in a tin bath, she moved into other areas of acting, Dr Who, Ironside and even the BBC adaptation of SMiley's People, and eventually writing.

I saw Miss Pitt interviewed a few years ago about the Hammer years and she had no qualms about the lesbianism or on screen nudity despite the somewhat condescending attitude of the interviewer. I suppose it says everything about the time we live in that whoever wrote the BBC news last night felt that the only adequate reference point was the mention of a company for whom she made just two films out of a career total of thirty.