Kitty Carlisle (1910–2007)

Kitty Carlisle was born Catherine Conn to a family of German Jewish origin in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father Joseph Conn, a physician, died when she was 10 years old, and her mother Hortense Holzman Conn then took her to Europe. Kitty traveled with her mother and attended a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland; she later studied at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. She decided on an acting career when she was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1932, she returned to the USA to study singing with Estelle Liebling in New York City. Under the name Kitty Carlisle, she got work on the radio and appeared in operettas and musical comedies on Broadway. She also broke into the movies, making pictures that included A Night at the Opera (1935) with the Marx Brothers and two films with Bing Crosby. In 1946, she married playwright and theatrical producer Moss Hart, and appeared in number of his works, including The Man Who Came to Dinner. (1949). The couple had two children. Kitty became a household name as a panelist on the television show To Tell the Truth from 1956 to 1978. She also was a semi-regular panelist on other shows such as Password, Match Game, I've Got a Secret, and What's My Line?
She became an avid patron and supporter of the performing arts and a champion of historic preservation. She served as chair of the New York State Council of the Arts for 20 years, beginning in 1976. She resumed her theatrical career in 1966, making her debut with the Metropolitan Opera as Prince Orlofsky in Strauss's Die Fledermaus. She had the title role of Carmen in Salt Lake City. She toured widely with a one-woman show in which she told anecdotes about many great men in American musical theater history she had known, such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, interspersed with performing some of their famous songs. She appeared in the films Radio Days (1987) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993), as well as on stage in the 1983 revival of On Your Toes. In 1997, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She published Kitty: An Autobiography in 1988.