orig. Karoline Blamauer
born Oct. 18, 1900, Penzing, Austria
died Nov. 27, 1981, New York, N.Y., U.S.
Austrian-born U.S. actress-singer.
Born into poverty, Lenya worked as a dancer and actress in Zürich and later in Berlin. She married the composer Kurt Weill in 1926 and began appearing in musical dramas by Weill and his longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht , such as Mahagonny (1927) and The Threepenny Opera (1928; film, 1930). Lenya and Weill fled Nazi Germany for Paris, where she sang in Brecht's and Weill's Seven Deadly Sins (1933). The couple moved to New York City in 1935, and Lenya made her U.S. debut in The Eternal Road (1937). After Weill's death, she lent her inimitably husky voice to revivals throughout the 1950s, including a long-running production of The Threepenny Opera , and she later performed in Brecht on Brecht (1962), Mother Courage and Her Children (1965), and Cabaret (1966), as well as in films.