Lovely and voluptuous, the actress Ingrid Pitt was given a choice early in her film career: pornography or horror. Ms. Pitt, who had spent her childhood in a Nazi concentration camp, later scoured Europe in search of her vanished father and still later was forced to flee East Germany a step ahead of the police, chose horror. It was a genre she knew firsthand.

Ms. Pitt, long celebrated as the first lady of British horror cinema, who starred in sanguinary classics of the 1970s like “The Vampire Lovers,” “Countess Dracula” and “The House That Dripped Blood,” died on Tuesday in London. She was 73 and had lived in London for many years.

The apparent cause was heart failure, her daughter, Steffanie Pitt-Blake, said.

Known for her tousled hair, pneumatic figure and sporadically sharp incisors, Ms. Pitt was most closely associated with Hammer Film Productions, the British studio famous for the lurid, the lascivious and the low-budget. The Queen of Scream, the British press called her. Hammer billed her as “the most beautiful ghoul in the world.”

In fact, Ms. Pitt made only a handful of horror films, and not all for Hammer. But her striking, barely clad screen presence and vampirical Middle European accent  it was her real accent  secured her an international cult following that seems likely to remain undead for years to come.