Kitty Carlisle Hart, who died Tuesday night at 96, was struck down while still in the prime of her cabaret singing career, the latest incarnation in what must be among the longest and most fabulous show business lives ever.

Although born a middle-class Jew in New Orleans (an ancestor was a crew member on the Confederate ironclad Merrimack), she was possessed of a mother whose determination that her daughter succeed included an education at Swiss and French boarding schools and debuts in Paris and Rome. But in a story Hart told often, when the family fortune was lost in the crash of 1929, her mother said: “You’re not the prettiest girl or the best singer, or the best actress. But if you put them all together you should do well in musical comedy. And we’ll find you a husband on the stage.”

She had already changed her name to Carlisle from Conn — she said she picked the name out of the phone book — and her mother followed suit.

Hart’s New York stage debut came in 1933 as Count Orlofsky in “Champagne Sec,” a version of “Die Fledermaus.” Reviews were gushing; The Wall Street Journal called her a “striking personality.” Six decades later, she would reprise the role at the Metropolitan Opera, by which time her striking personality had become the figurehead of the New York art scene.

Swiftly whisked to Hollywood from Broadway, Hart made two pictures with Bing Crosby and then in 1935 had her filmic swansong in the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera,” in which she plays an ingénue and sings the aria “Misère” from “Il Trovatore.” She went on a three-day strike to force MGM to use her own voice, later calling it “the bravest thing I’ve ever done.” Harpo Marx’s paintings hung in her home for decades.

Perhaps sensing an overly independent spirit, Irving Thalberg had MGM buy out Hart’s contract and back she went to Broadway, where she succeeded again in leading roles. For the next decade she performed in New York and in regional theater, and even sang the title role in a production of “The Merry Widow ” at the Boston Opera House.

Hart was among the most sought-after women of her age, and her boyfriends included Sinclair Lewis and George Gershwin, who proposed six months before he died. “The Man I Love” was a standard part of her cabaret act. But it was playwright-director Moss Hart, author of “The Man Who Came to Dinnerm,” who captured her heart. They married in 1946, and she retired from the stage to raise their two children, except for occasional returns in Moss Hart productions.

At her husband’s urging, she took on the less time-intensive role as a panelist on the CBS show “To Tell the Truth,” and it was as a celebrity questioner that she found national fame. “How else could New York have turned into a village for me?” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1971. “Guys pop out of manholes to shout, ‘Hello, Kitty, how are you?'” She took pains never to appear on television in the same gown twice, often borrowing outfits from her friend Brooke Astor.

In 1961, she was widowed, an event she once called “the only real tragedy of my life.” Around the same time, she joined the board of the Manhattan School of Music. Governor Rockefeller appointed her to the board of the New York State Council on the Arts, and in 1976 Governor Carey appointed her to what became two decades as chairman. “I called all my governors ‘Governor darling,'” she told American Heritage in 2005. She insisted on expanding the council’s funding to community projects and individuals, a policy that proved somewhat embarrassing when edgy artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe ended up with state money.

After Governor Pataki declined to reappoint her in 1996, Hart dusted off her nightclub act and started singing again after a decade without performing. She told Good Housekeeping in 1997 that getting her voice back in shape was “like pushing a ten-ton truck uphill with my nose.” She embarked upon an ambitious series of national tours that lasted until 2006.

She last performed in public in November, when she appeared at Jazz at Lincoln Center and sang “The Man I Love.” She had bookings through this summer, but became ill with pneumonia at Christmas and never recovered.

Friends and relations commented on the joy that suffused her performances and her life as one of New York’s most famous hostesses. “I take everything that comes my way,” she told the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2005. “And wonderful things come my way.”

Kitty Carlisle Hart
Born Catherine Conn on September 3, 1910, in New Orleans; died April 17 at her East 64th Street apartment of pneumonia; survived by her son, Christopher, a theater director, her daughter, Catherine, a physician, and three grandchildren.