Kitty Carlisle Hart (also billed as Kitty Carlisle) (born 3 September 1910) is a United States singer, actress, and spokeswoman for the arts. She is probably best known from being a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth.
She was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and named Catherine Conn (the surname was pronounced Cohen); her family was of German Jewish heritage. Her father, Dr. Joseph Conn, was a gynecologist who died when she was ten. Her mother was Hortense Holtzman, a daughter of the first Jewish mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, and a woman notoriously obsessed with breaking into Gentile society. (As Hortense Conn once said to a taxi driver who asked if her daughter was Jewish, "She may be, but I'm not.") Taken to Europe in 1921 -- Hortense Conn hoped to marry her daughter off to European royalty, believing them more amenable to a Jewish bride, and only ended up flitting around Europe and living in what her daughter recalled as "the worst room of the best hotel" -- she was educated in New Orleans and Switzerland (Ecole Mont Choisi in Lausanne), then at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. She studied acting in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After returning to New York in 1932 with her mother, she got her acting start in America at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She appeared, billed as Kitty Carlisle, on Broadway in several operettas and musical comedies, and in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. For a brief moment, she considered taking the stage name Kitty Vere de Vere.
Her early movies included a role in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera and two films with Bing Crosby.
She became a household name through To Tell the Truth, where she was a regular panelist for some 20 years, appearing on each version from 1956 to 2002.
She married playwright Moss Hart on 10 August 1946. He died 21 December 1961. They had two children.
Known for her gracious manners and personal elegance, late in life she became prominent in social circle of New York City as she crusaded for financial support of the arts. She was appointed to various state-wide councils, and was chairman of the New York State Council of the Arts for 20 years. She also served on the boards of various New York City cultural institutions.
She resumed her acting late in life, appearing in Woody Allen's Radio Days and in Six Degrees of Separation, as well as on stage in a revival of On Your Toes. In recent years, she has been linked romantically to financier and art collector Roy Neuberger. Though nearing her centenary, she still tours and performs with gusto; her act consists of anecdotes about the many great men in American musical theatre history that she has known, notably George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Oscar Hammerstein, and Frederick Loewe, interspersed with a few of the songs that made each one famous.
