It’s just come to my attention that Kitty Carlisle Hart has died.
As the widow of the great playwright Moss Hart, she was a constant in the New York arts world, a great supporter of the arts.
She’s well-known to Baby Boomers as one of the permanent “contestants†on the long-running game show To Tell the Truth, the dark-haired older woman with the infectious laugh.
But before that she was a great musical comedy and operetta star. She wasn’t the most beautiful or the best singer or the best actress but as an attactive ingenue with a very decent operetta soprano she was pretty darned good.
This is really the end of an era—she was the remaining bridge between today and the Broadway of the 1920’s, the Broadway of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin (whom she dated) and Moss Hart (whom she married).
And she’ll always be immortal for her performance in the unforgettable Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Roughly two minutes into the following clip she and the tremendous Alan Jones sing. You needed talent in those days and they had it.
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Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones in A Night at the Opera
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