Karen Akers

Cabaret singer and actress Karen Akers was born Karen Orth-Pallavicini in New York City on October 13, 1945. Her ancestry was a mixture of European stock: her immigrant father, a member of the European nobility who dropped his title when he came to America, was of Austrian and Swiss/Italian heritage; her American-born mother had Russian, Norwegian, and French forebears on one side of her family and Scots-Irish ones on the other. Akers initially aspired to be a folksinger in the 1960s, but she also began auditioning for Broadway shows, and by the 1970s was leaving her acoustic guitar behind as she appeared in nightclubs. By the start of the 1980s, she had achieved sufficient prominence on the nightclub circuit that PBS gave her her own special, Presenting Karen Akers, which in turn was released in audio form by Sterling Records as her debut album in 1981. Akers made her Broadway debut in Nine, a musical directed by Tommy Tune and based on the autobiographical Federico Fellini film 8 1/2, playing the part of Luisa Contini, the wife of promiscuous film director Guido Contini, a role that allowed her to sing the Maury Yeston-penned songs "My Husband Makes Movies" and "Be On Your Own." The show opened May 9, 1982, and had a successful run of 732 performances, closing February 4, 1984. Akers won a Theatre World Award for her performance and was one of three actresses in the show nominated for the Tony Award for Featured Actress in a Musical, losing to her fellow cast member Liliane Montevecchi. Nine was recorded for an original Broadway cast album released by Columbia Records. In 1983, Akers gave her first concert at Carnegie Hall. She made her film debut in Woody Allen's comic fantasy The Purple Rose of Cairo in 1985 and was featured on the original soundtrack album...