Ingrid Pitt, Britain's favourite scream queen back in the early 1970s, tells Donald Clarke about her fascinating life
Horror fans will be familiar with one version of the older Ingrid Pitt. In 1971's Countess Dracula, a fine slice of gothic cheese from Hammer Films' later, sexier period, the Polish-born actress gamely allowed herself to be transformed into a warty, cleft-faced crone. Born in 1937, Ingrid is, to be fair, many decades younger than the ancient Countess, but it is still a relief to discover that she has aged into a handsome, round-faced woman. She is a little unsteady on her legs - a recent fall didn't help that - but, playing up for our photographer before gargoyles and battlements, she appears to have an admirable zest for that part of life that deals with death.
Pitt has been invited to Dublin by the Stoker Dracula Organisation for a screening of the classic 1973 film, The Wicker Man. The following day, after strolling past the video arcade and swimming pool in Clontarf's Westwood leisure complex, we find her lurking in the bowels of the delightfully tacky Dracula Experience. She bares her fangs and curls her hands into talons. She cackles madly.
Her predictably bizarre website, pittofhorror.com, informs its readers that, following the Dublin adventure, she will be heading off to New York and Baltimore. If, however, you miss her in America, she will be at a horror convention at the NEC in Birmingham later this month. Phew! "I am always busy," she says. " I just finished a film in Luxembourg about Greek mythology: Minotaur. When I went to the audition they said: we will get you a great big dog to lick the blood off your legs. I don't work with dogs. I told them: 'If you don't get me a wolf I won't do it.'"
An air of jolly camp has hung around Ingrid Pitt ever since she rolled about the flagstones with Kate O'Mara in Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970). The handful of films she made for Hammer secured her place as the first lady of that class of cosy horror which bloomed in Britain between the Suez crisis and the three-day week.
"After the war everybody said: 'Oh, we want to see horror films, because horror is no longer the war,'" she says, before embarking on the first of many meandering conversational rambles. "The war was so horrendous you couldn't think of films. And then when films came back they were full of violence. People liked that for some reason."
For the last three decades or so she has been happy to have her name glibly associated with something called "horror". But Pitt, whose early life had much in common with her compatriot, Roman Polanski, has surely come closer to a proper understanding of that word than any of us would wish for ourselves. In 1942, Pitt and her mother, who was Jewish, were incarcerated by the invading Nazis in Stutthof concentration camp. Both survived and, after spending the last year of the war living rough with the partisans, made their way to Berlin to search for Ingrid's father, who had been detained elsewhere. They eventually found him, shattered, withered and skeletal.
PITT TOLD THE story in her extraordinary - if unfortunately titled - autobiography, Life's a Scream. Later she said that she regretted revisiting that material. I wonder why.
"Because when I married Tony I got over it," she says, looking across to her third husband. Tony Rudlin, a former racing driver with a very English moustache, remains quietly phlegmatic. He has been married to Ingrid for 30 years and I suspect he is long-suffering.
"I didn't scream in the night any more," she continues. "He looked after me and I looked hard at life. My mother came to live with us and Tony built her a lovely room and she cooked for us and went shopping for us. She said: 'When I can't do this any more I will die.'" A pause.
"Sorry, what did you ask me, again?" While Ingrid has some trouble with her short-term memory, her recall of the war years is staggering. After some further prodding, she launches into a grim story concerning a childhood romance.
"I think I first knew I wanted to act in the camp. I used to lie on the straw and try and believe I was somewhere else. But then it got really important when I was with the partisans. I remember Yuri, my great love, the son of a Russian squadron leader. Yuri and I were an item.
"Once, I fell into this horrible pit, all covered with snow, where all the Jews had been shot by the Germans. I couldn't scream, because Yuri said it was dangerous to scream. He pulled me out with such incredible fervour. He finally got me out of the ditch and dragged me out of the wood. He lay on top of me and he finally made me feel warm again."
Following a brief spell as a medical student, Pitt, now resident in Berlin, became a member of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. But, after ranting once too often at the commissar who hosted the political education sessions, she began to attract the attention of the Volkspolizei. The communist goons eventually came calling on the first night of a production of Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children. Helene Weigel, the playwright's formidable wife, stood up for her young cast member.
"Helene told them to go away: 'She's already been in one of your camps. Leave her alone.' But they eventually came in. I fled and slipped and fell into the river. I was drifting about the river in my costume and trying desperately to swim. Thank goodness I was a champion swimmer." Ingrid was plucked from the water by a US marine officer named Roland Pitt. The next day, while she was recuperating from her damp trauma, the doorbell rang. It was her rescuer. The two were married and, a few short months later, Ingrid found herself living on a military base in Colorado. She does not explain Roland's subsequent disappearance from the story very satisfactorily. It seems their relationship just spontaneously withered when the officer went to Vietnam. At any rate, after a spell living on an Indian reservation with daughter Steffi, she returned to Europe.
SHORTLY AFTER LANDING in Spain, Ingrid was photographed crying elegantly at a bullfight. The image ended up on the front page of a newspaper, where it attracted the attention of a Spanish film producer.
"I appeared in all these films, but I didn't really know what I was saying because I didn't really speak Spanish," she laughs.
She then moved to Los Angeles and, after doing guest-star work on various TV cop shows, was offered a role alongside Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood in the rainy-bank-holiday classic, Where Eagles Dare. "I did this audition and I was absolutely terrible," she says. "But the director loved it and the performance ended up being exactly the same as the audition. I had to say I was German to get the role and I didn't like that." Another two years of poverty followed before Jimmy Carreras, the legendary founder of Hammer films, signed her up for The Vampire Lovers. The horror films she made in the early 1970s helped turn her into something of a British institution. Did it trouble her that she never made it in Hollywood?
"No, not at all," she bellows. "I didn't like Hollywood. I couldn't stand it. I could never imagine that I might live there forever with my daughter. It is a horrible place." The trenchant anti-EU sentiments expressed in her regular columns for Pitt of Horror suggest that she may be turning into a little Englander.
"That is because I hate the Germans," she says. "I still hate them. My husband says I must learn to not hate them, but I enjoy hating them. So I do." Tony makes vaguely emollient noises. "Yes, we have had a few nasty incidents at dinner parties as a result of that," he says. "There have been a few occasions when we have had to politely say goodbye and leave." It is sad that Ingrid Pitt still carries around the emotional burdens she first shouldered half a century ago. But she seems to have done a pretty good job of filling her life with distractions. In the 30 years since her blood-drinking pomp, she has written several horror stories, a bedside companion to vampire lovers, a novel set in Argentina during the Peron years and that fascinating autobiography (recently reissued under the less ribald title Darkness Before Dawn).
Tony has taught her to fly and she maintains an interest in golf, cricket and - it says here - cuddling.
But her main enthusiasm outside family remains her fans. Pitt spends large portions of the year at horror conventions and, Tony maintains, will not leave until she has signed every programme and posed for everyone's camera.
And she does more. As I am kissing her goodbye I suddenly feel a strange stinging sensation just above the collar. Ingrid Pitt is biting my neck. Dennis from the Stoker Dracula Organisation shuffles his papers. She's still nibbling. Tony smiles stoically like a squadron leader counting the spitfires back home again. Eventually she stops. Now that's what I call a professional.