Karen Akers

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Karen Akers (born October 13 1945) is an American actress and singer, who has appeared on Broadway, cabaret and film.

She was born Karen Orth-Pallavicini in New York City on October 13, 1945. Her ancestry was a mixture of European stock: her immigrant father, Heinrick C. Orth-Pallavicini (reportedly a member of the European nobility who dropped his title when he came to America) was of Austrian and Swiss/Italian heritage, and her American-born mother, Mary, had Russian, Norwegian, and French forebears on one side of her family and Scots-Irish ones on the other. Her younger sister, Nicole Orth-Pallavicini, is also an actress. Karen Akers graduated from Manhattanville College.

On September 19, 1993, she married Kevin Patrick Power, a vice president of Orion Network Systems, a satellite communications company in a Roman Catholic ceremony at St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University in New York (see [1]). It was her second marriage. She has 2 sons from her first marriage to Jim Akers, which ended in divorce.

She first appeared on Broadway in the original production of Nine, a musical directed by Tommy Tune and based on the Federico Fellini film 8½, playing the part of Luisa Contini, the wife of promiscuous film director Guido Contini (Raul Julia). 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.

She appeared again on Broadway in Grand Hotel, a musical adaptation of the novel and film, again directed by Tommy Tune with a score by Robert Wright, George Forrest, and Maury Yeston. The show opened November 12, 1989, for a successful run of 1,018 performances through April 19, 1992.

She also appeared in the Woody Allen film The Purple Rose of Cairo as a celluloid chanteuse.

A review in Variety described her as "a contralto with uncommon dramatic depth", and a "sultry chanteuse."^[1]

References

1. ^ "Karen Akers -- First You Dream: The Songs of Kander & Ebb." Marilyn Stasio. Variety Review Database. New York: Apr 2006. pg. n/a

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