The lady was a vamp

Ingrid Pitt gets her teeth into the action in The Vampire Lovers.

When it comes to scream queens, Ingrid Pitt is the mother of them all. The Polish-born actress is remembered for her racy roles in Hammer horrors - she famously appeared topless as Carmilla the vampire seductress in 1970's The Vampire Lovers and followed it up in 1971 with Countess Dracula.

The films sparked a sub-genre of erotic vampire films, including Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Hammer's sequels, Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1972).

"People loved it straight away," says Pitt, who still has an accent which sounds straight out of the Transylvanian Alps. "It's a fantastic thing to have done the two films. They made a lot of money for Hammer; they were broke at the time."

Those films - along with another fanged appearance in the 1970 anthology The House That Dripped Blood and her topless washtub scene in The Wicker Man (1973) - have etched her voluptuous image onto the retinas of horror fans for decades.

Born Ingoushka Petrov, Pitt survived a childhood in Nazi concentration camps. She appeared in several low-budget Spanish films before landing a supporting role in World War II thriller Where Eagles Dare (1967) alongside Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.

"Probably one of the most important war films ever made," she says, "I got a lot of fame from that."

She's a cult figure these days, mainly for her sexy role in The Vampire Lovers, an erotic vampire tale based on the 1872 novella Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, which predated Bram Stoker's Dracula by two decades.

But it's the true story of Countess Dracula, loosely based around the bloodthirsty legend of 16th-century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth (Erzebet) Bathory, that really intrigues her.

Pitt took the stories about the Countess and recounted them in her book The Ingrid Pitt Bedside Companion for Vampire Lovers: "The blood, spurting from a dozen wounds, cascaded down on the Countess who would moan."

In 1973 she appeared in The Wicker Man. Christopher Lee played the villain, Lord Summerisle. Of his role as Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, she's quick off the mark. "Everything Christopher does is wonderful, even though they cut him out of the film. I'm livid about it."

The Wicker Man became a cult hit, so much so that a 2006 Hollywood remake has just been released. "Oh it's horrible. I think they should just die," she says. "I haven't seen it and I don't want to."

Her first novel, published in 1980, is called Cuckoo Run. She also wrote two novels based on her time in Argentina with the Perons. Her autobiography, Life's A Scream, was published in 1999.

At 68, Pitt still acts in small roles - "I do two films a year if I can". She appears occasionally at conventions, has her own website, Pittofhorror.com, and there's a fan club devoted to her. She's currently writing a book on Hammer Films.

She doesn't like to watch horror films herself. "I was in a concentration camp as a child and I don't want to see horror. I think it's very amazing that I do horror films when I had this awful childhood. But maybe that's why I'm good at it."

Did she keep the fangs? "Well I did have one pair. Somebody once in a television interview wanted to try them on and she broke them. They can't be fixed. So I have them, and I don't."

* Sky Television's MGM channel features a Hammer Horror special this month with The Vampire Lovers screening Friday October 6, 8.30pm.