Actress Kitty Carlisle Hart dies in NY at 96

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Singer and actress Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose credits stretched from Broadway musicals to a Marx Brothers movie hit and stints on TV game shows, died on Wednesday at 96, according to a local funeral home and her Web site.

Neither source disclosed the cause of death, but Hart had been suffering from pneumonia, according to local media.

A grande dame of the New York performing arts, Hart last fall starred in a show, featuring stories from her colorful life, called "I Walk with Music" at a New York cabaret club, to celebrate her 96th birthday.

"Singing has made my life, and now that I'm 96 I have had the most wonderful renaissance of my career," she told Reuters last year in an interview. "I do gigs all over the place and they pay me a fortune."

In 1935 she appeared in the Marx Brothers' comedy "A Night at the Opera."

Baby boomers may know her best as a longtime panelist on the television game show "To Tell the Truth," popular in the 1950s and 1960s. She also appeared as a panelist on the shows "What's My Line?" and "I've Got a Secret."

In 1946 she married playwright Moss Hart, who wrote "You Can't Take It With You" with George S. Kaufman. The play earned them a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Her husband also wrote "Winged Victory," "The Man Who Came to Dinner," also with Kaufman, and won a Tony award for best director for "My Fair Lady" on Broadway. He died in 1961.

The couple had two children.

Born in New Orleans, Hart moved to Switzerland with her mother after her father died in an influenza epidemic in 1920.

She studied drama in London before moving to New York, where she made her name in the 1930s.

She performed in operettas and musical comedies and on film as Bing Crosby's love interest in "Here is My Heart" and "She Loves Me Not," both in 1934.

In the 1940s, she appeared on stage in "Walk with Music," "The Merry Widow" and Benjamin Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia."

She debuted at the Metropolitan Opera as Prince Orlofsky in "Die Fledermaus" in 1967 when she was in her 50s.

In later years, she appeared in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra and with the Boston Opera Company, and she had a role in Woody Allen's "Radio Days."

Hart recalled last year that she was fired after she appeared in "A Night at the Opera."