Kitty Carlisle was the leading lady in the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera and was a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth.
27 Facts About Kitty Carlisle
2.
Kitty Carlisle served 20 years on the New York State Council on the Arts.
3.
Kitty Carlisle was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1999.
4.
Kitty Carlisle was born as Catherine Conn in New Orleans, Louisiana, of German-Jewish heritage.
5.
Kitty Carlisle's father, Joseph Conn, MD, was a gynecologist who died when she was ten years old.
6.
Carlisle's mother took her to Europe in 1921, where she hoped Kitty would marry European royalty, believing that nobility were more likely to marry a Jewish girl.
7.
Kitty Carlisle was educated at the Chateau Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.
8.
Kitty Carlisle studied acting in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
9.
Kitty Carlisle studied singing with Estelle Liebling, the teacher of Beverly Sills, in New York City.
10.
Kitty Carlisle sang the title role in Georges Bizet's Carmen in Salt Lake City.
11.
Kitty Carlisle privately studied voice with Juilliard teacher Anna E Schoen-Rene, who had been a student of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Manuel Garcia.
12.
Kitty Carlisle resumed her film career later in life, appearing in Woody Allen's Radio Days and in Six Degrees of Separation, as well as on stage in a revival of On Your Toes, replacing Dina Merrill.
13.
On December 31,1966, Kitty Carlisle made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera, as Prince Orlofsky in Strauss's Die Fledermaus.
14.
Kitty Carlisle sang the role 10 more times that season, then returned in 1973 for four more performances.
15.
Kitty Carlisle reprised this role during the Beverly Sills Farewell Gala in October 1980.
16.
Kitty Carlisle dated George Gershwin in 1933 "until George went to California".
17.
Kitty Carlisle never remarried, although she briefly dated former governor and presidential candidate Thomas E Dewey after the death of his wife.
18.
Kitty 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.
19.
Kitty Carlisle was appointed to various statewide councils, and was chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts from 1976 to 1996.
20.
Kitty Carlisle 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.
21.
Kitty Carlisle was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.
22.
Kitty Carlisle widely performed her one-woman show in which she told anecdotes about the many great men in American musical theater history whom she had known, notably George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, interspersed with a few of the songs that made each of them famous.
23.
Kitty Carlisle Hart was a longtime champion of Historic Preservation in New York City and State.
24.
Kitty Carlisle died on April 17,2007, from congestive heart failure resulting from a prolonged bout of pneumonia.
25.
Kitty Carlisle had been in and out of the hospital since she contracted pneumonia some time prior to November 2006.
26.
Kitty Carlisle died in her Upper East Side, Manhattan apartment, with her son, Christopher Hart, at her bedside.
27.
Kitty Carlisle was interred in a crypt next to her husband, Moss Hart, at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.