Catherine Lambert Lost in Translation (2003)
Catherine Lambert is the Toronto-based jazz singer who plays Catherine, the lounge singer at the Park Hyatt's New York Bar whose set runs under several of the film's bar scenes and who eventually goes home with Bob.b30 Lambert was a working jazz singer at the time of casting, not a film actor; Sofia Coppola heard her perform at the New York Bar — the actual bar in the actual hotel where the film's bar scenes are set — and offered her the part.
A working jazz singer cast for what she was
Lambert had been a fixture on the Toronto and international hotel-jazz circuit since the 1980s, working a repertoire of standards — Cole Porter, Gershwin, Joni Mitchell, the kind of late-twentieth-century jazz-and-pop repertoire that the New York Bar's room demanded. She had been performing residencies at the Park Hyatt Tokyo for a number of years by the time Coppola arrived to scout locations.
"Sofia came in one night and watched the set. She came up afterward and said she was making a movie and she'd like to put me in it. I thought she was joking. I said yes anyway." — Catherine Lambert, The Toronto Star (2003)
The room in the film is the room where she actually worked. The songs she performs in the film — including "Scarborough Fair," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," and the "Midnight at the Oasis" cover under the late-night bar return sceneb35 — are part of her actual setlist.
What the character does
Catherine is, structurally, the rupture. She is the demonstration that Bob is not a saint of the bounded experience — the post-midpoint approach has to absorb the data that he is a lonely, available middle-aged man who will sleep with the lounge singer.b30 Charlotte's discovery the next morning, when she goes up to bring Bob to lunch and hears the woman's voice in his suite, is staged without confrontation;b31 the rupture and the absorption together are the post-midpoint test.
"The lounge singer is a figure the film treats with real care. She's not a villain. She's not really even an interruption. She's the demonstration that what's happening between Bob and Charlotte exists inside a real life, with all the messiness that entails." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2003)
Lambert is also the uncredited voice of Lauren on the phone in the shrine callb5 and the Kyoto follow-upb24 — a small piece of doubling typical of Coppola's economical-cast aesthetic.
After Lost in Translation
Lambert has continued to work as a jazz singer, returning to the Park Hyatt residency periodically and recording several albums. She has not pursued further screen work.
"I'm a singer. The movie was a beautiful thing, and I'm grateful it happened. But I wasn't trying to become an actor. I went back to my room." — Catherine Lambert, JazzTimes (2008)