Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer was born in Austria where she was a singer, monologist (or diseuse), and actress. Her breakthrough role was as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera, the play which included the song “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”). She left Germany for Paris in 1933, due to her distaste of Adolph Hitler, later moving to New York.
In the United States, she appeared on and off Broadway and won the only Tony award given to an off Broadway performer for her role as Jenny in an English version of The Threepenny Opera. She originated the role of Fräulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of the musical Cabaret.
She received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for supporting actress as Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales in the screen version of Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. She also played the murderous and sadistic Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.
Her name is primarily known today due to Louis Armstrong, who when he recorded the song “Mack the Knife,” both as a solo number and as a duet with Lenya, added Lenya’s name into the lyrics, in place of one of the characters in the play. Bobby Darin’s 1959 hit recording of the song used these updated lyrics mentioning Lenya.
Lenya died of cancer in 1981. Her first census in the U.S. was the 1940 census of Ramapo, NY, as Caroline Wiell.
Click on the census for a larger view.
Sources
- Wikipedia.org
- Ancestry.com
- Onthisday.com
- Picryl.com
- Youtube.com
Famous People and Their First Census 