Kitty Carlisle

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Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Kitty Carlisle Hart (born Catherine Conn; September 3, 1910 – April 17, 2007)<ref name=TownHallobit>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=TimesUnion>Template:Cite newsTemplate:Dead linkTemplate:Cbignore</ref> was an American stage and screen actress, opera singer, television personality and spokesperson for the arts. She was the leading lady in the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera (1935) and was a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell The Truth (1956–1978). She served 20 years on the New York State Council on the Arts.

In 1991, she received the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1999.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life

Kitty Carlisle was born Catherine Conn (pronounced Cohen) in New Orleans, Louisiana, of German-Jewish heritage. Her grandfather, Ben Holzman, was a mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, and a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War. He had been a gunner on the Template:Ship, the Confederate ironclad warship that fought the Template:USS at the Battle of Hampton Roads. Her father, Joseph Conn, MD, was a gynecologist who died when she was ten years old. Her mother, Hortense Holzman Conn, was eager for her daughter to be accepted by local society. Hortense’s desire to assimilate was so great, a taxi driver once asked if her daughter was Jewish, and she answered, "She may be, but I'm not."<ref name="Carlisle Hart">Template:Cite news</ref>

Carlisle's mother took her to Europe in 1921, where she hoped Kitty would marry European royalty, believing nobility were more likely to marry a Jewish girl. They traveled around Europe and often lived in what Carlisle recalled as "the worst room of the best hotel". Kitty was educated at the Template:Ill in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. She studied acting in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> She studied singing with Estelle Liebling, the teacher of Beverly Sills, in New York City.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Career

Acting

File:A Night at the Opera lobby card.jpg
1935 lobby card for film co-starring Carlisle

After returning to New York in 1932 with her mother, she appeared, billed as Kitty Carlisle, on Broadway in several operettas and musical comedies, and in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. She also sang the title role in Georges Bizet's Carmen in Salt Lake City. She privately studied voice with Juilliard teacher Anna E. Schoen-Rene, who had been a student of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Manuel Garcia.<ref>Juilliard Archives: Anna E.Schoen-Rene scrapbooks</ref>

Carlisle's early movies included Murder at the Vanities (1934), A Night at the Opera (1935) with the Marx Brothers, and two films with Bing Crosby, She Loves Me Not (1934) and Here Is My Heart (1934). Carlisle resumed her film career later in life, appearing in Woody Allen's Radio Days (1987) and in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), as well as on stage in a revival of On Your Toes, replacing Dina Merrill. Her last movie appearance was in Catch Me If You Can (2002) in which she played herself in a dramatization of a 1970s To Tell the Truth episode.

For her contributions to the film industry, Carlisle was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star located at 6611 Hollywood Boulevard.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Television

Carlisle became a household name through the television game show To Tell the Truth, where she was a regular panelist from 1956 to 1978, and later appeared on revivals of the series in 1980, 1990–91 and one episode in 2000. She was also a semi-regular panelist on Password, Match Game, Missing Links, and What's My Line?

Opera

On December 31, 1966, Carlisle made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera, as Prince Orlofsky in Strauss's Die Fledermaus. She sang the role 10 more times that season, then returned in 1973 for four more performances. Her final performance with the company was on July 7, 1973. She reprised this role during the Beverly Sills Farewell Gala in October 1980.

Personal life

File:Kitty Carlisle 2000.jpg
Carlisle in 2000

Carlisle dated George Gershwin in 1933 "until George went to California".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> On August 10, 1946, she married playwright and theatrical producer Moss Hart, whom she met at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania.<ref>"Moss Hart And Kitty Carlisle", photograph of wedding of Hart and Carlisle on August 10, 1946, New Hope, Pennsylvania. Underwood Archives, Getty Images, Seattle, Washington. Retrieved November 3, 2019.</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> They had two children. Hart died on December 20, 1961, at their home in Palm Springs, California.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> She never remarried, although she briefly dated former governor and presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey after the death of his wife. During the 1980s and 1990s, Carlisle was the partner of diplomatic historian Ivo John Lederer, a relationship that lasted 16 years until Lederer's death in 1998. In her later years, she kept company with financier and art collector Roy Neuberger.<ref>The passionate collector: eighty years in the world of art, by Roy R. Neuberger, Alfred Connable, Roma Connable</ref>

Carlisle was known for her gracious manner and personal elegance, and she became prominent in New York City social circles as she crusaded for financial support of the arts. She was appointed to various statewide councils, and was chairperson of the New York State Council on the Arts from 1976 to 1996. One of the two state theaters housed at The Egg performing arts venue in Albany is named the Kitty Carlisle Hart Theatre.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She also served on the boards of various New York City cultural institutions and made an appearance at the annual CIBC World Markets Miracle Day, a children's charity event. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.<ref name=AAAS>Template:Cite web</ref>

Carlisle also widely performed her one-woman show, in which she told anecdotes about the great men of American musical theater she had known, notably George Gershwin (who had proposed marriage),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, and interspersed with songs that had made each of them famous.

Historic preservation

Carlisle Hart was a longtime champion of historic preservation in New York City and State. While chair of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), from 1976 to 1996, she directed many millions of dollars in support to preservation projects, from the Niagara Frontier to Staten Island. This was in an effort to keep historic preservation as a core program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the only arts council in America that provides such funding.Template:Cn In 1980, she was crowned Queen of the Beaux Arts Ball, an annual event run by the Beaux Arts Society (American comedian Paul Lynde was crowned King the same year).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In recognition of this legacy, the Historic Districts Council presented its Landmarks Lion award to her in 2003.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Death

Carlisle died on April 17, 2007, aged 96, from congestive heart failure resulting from a prolonged bout of pneumonia.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=APobit>Template:Cite news</ref> She had been in and out of the hospital since she contracted pneumonia some time prior to November 2006. She died in her Upper East Side,<ref name="RonAlex">Template:Cite news</ref> Manhattan apartment, with her son, Christopher Hart, at her bedside. She was interred in a crypt next to her husband, Moss Hart, at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.Template:Citation needed

Theatre credits

Filmography

Television

Cultural activities

Bibliography

References

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Template:National Medal of Arts recipients 1990s Template:Authority control

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