Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer, best remembered in the U.S. for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963),but celebrated in Germany for her groundbreaking performances in the plays of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and her recordings of songs from those works.
Born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire),into a working-class family, young Lenya was fond of dancing. In 1914, she moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where she began using her stage name, Lotte Lenya. She studied classical dance, singing, and acting and made her stage debut at the Schauspielhaus. Two years later, she moved to Berlin and blended in the city's cosmopolitan cultural milieu.
In 1924, she met composer Kurt Weill, and they married in 1926. 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, and at the same time, being stressed by the circumstances of life, she divorced from Kurt Weil, only to be reunited with him two years later. In 1935, both emigrated to the United States and remarried in 1937.
After Kurt Weill's death, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill's music played in numerous productions worldwide. In 1957, she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of 'The Threepenny Opera'. 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),which brought her an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
She gained additional fame after appearing as Rosa Klebb, former head of operations for SMERSH/KGB, and now a sadistic Spectre agent with a poisonous knife in her shoe, in From Russia with Love (1963). Lotte Lenya died of cancer on November 27, 1981, in New York. She is entombed with Kurt Weill in a mausoleum, in Mount Repose Cemetery, in Haverstraw, New York, USA.
