Biography

Anna Russell

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Actress, singer, lyricist, and composer, Anna Russell began as a folk singer on BBC radio in 1931, in Canada in 1940, and since 1943, has appeared as a soloist on the concert stage, making her New York City debut in a one-woman show in 1948 with which she has toured the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada; she wrote the lyrics and music for Anna Russell's Little Show (1953) and played the Witch in the opera Hansel and Gretel (1953); with Robert Paine Grose and Joan White, she founded Grow Productions, Inc. in 1963, which presented Lady Audley's Secret at the New York World's Fair in 1964; she has composed, written, and performed her own material on Columbia recordings, is the author of The Power of Being a Positive Stinker (1955) and the Anna Russell Songbook (1958), and was the President of the B & R Music Publishing Company. She received the Canadian Women's Press Club Award in 1956 as the best Canadian comedy writer of the year.
- IMDb mini biography by: tillmany@pacbell.net

Her amazing 30-minute comedic distillation of Wagner's 20-hour opera cycle "The Ring"

As Russell pondered the complex family relations of Wagner's doomed and addled Siegfried and followed him from the rock of Brunnhilde to the palace of Gutrune, she paused to note that Gutrune is "the only woman that Siegfried's ever come across who wasn't his aunt. I'm not making this up, you know!" The line became her catchphrase and the title of her 1985 autobiography.
Her catchphrase was "I'm not making this up, you know!".
After spending many years in North America, Anna Russell relocated to New South Wales and spent the last years of her life with her "adopted daughter" and biographer Darlene Prussak.

[Describing the plot of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungs"] I'm not making this up, you know!
To be a Dramatic Soprano requires not so much the attributes of a singer, as those of a successful auctioneer or hog-caller. To blast your way through a Wagnerian orchestra, for instance, a beautiful tone is an absolute waste of time. You're much better off with the factory-whistle or buzz-saw type voice. With a good cutting edge.

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