Late Career
In 1956 she won a Tony Award for her role as Jenny in Marc Blitzstein's English version of The Threepenny Opera, the only time an Off-Broadway performance has been so honored. Lenya went on to record a number of songs from her time in Berlin, as well as songs from the American stage. Her voice had deepened with age. When she was to sing the soprano part in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins, the part needed transposition to substantially lower keys.
Sprechstimme was used in some famous songs in the Brecht-Weill plays, but now Lenya used it even more to compensate for the shortcomings of her voice. Lenya was aware of this as a problem; in other contexts she was very careful about fully respecting her late husband's score. She founded the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, to administer incomes and issues regarding rights, and to spread knowledge about Weill's work. She was present in the studio when Louis Armstrong recorded Brecht-Weill's Mack the Knife. Armstrong improvised the line "Look out for Miss Lotte Lenya!" and added her name to the list of Mack's female conquests in the song.
Her role as Vivien Leigh's earthy friend Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales in the screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) brought Lenya an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
In 1963, she was cast as the SPECTRE agent Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, starring Sean Connery and Robert Shaw. In the final scene in the film, she wore a shoe with a switchblade knife that sprang forth to stick out the front of the shoe; however this failed to eliminate Bond and she was fatally shot by Bond girl Tatiana Romanova (played by Daniela Bianchi). She later said in interviews that when she met new people, the first thing they looked at was her shoes.
In 1966, Lenya originated the role of Fräulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of the musical Cabaret. Kander and Ebb's score was considered by some to be inspired by Weill's music. This, combined with Lenya's personal history made her a particularly appropriate casting choice.
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