Eartha Kitt, the American singer, dancer, actress and self-professed "sex-kitten" died aged 81 on Christmas Day Thursday 2008.She was one of the most remarkable and distinctive entertainers in the history of cabaret and the light musical stage and to tribute in relation to this blog she was the third Catwoman in the Batman television series in 1967-8. Andrew Freedman, Mrs Kitt's long standing agent, announced that she had lost a long battle against colon cancer at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Her daughter and manager, Kitt Shapiro, was at her side.
Born on January 17 1927 on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, Eartha Kitt was raised by a woman called Anna Mae, who she believed was her mother. The singer later said that her father was the white son of the plantation owner, and that she had been conceived by rape. Named Eartha after the year's good crop, she lived with Anna Mae in grinding poverty until her mother met a new husband who rejected the mixed race child. Eartha Kitt was sent away to poor relation Mamie Kitt in Harlem, New York City. She was told that Mamie was her 'aunt', but in later life came to believe that she was in fact her biological mother who had abandoned her from "shame". It was in New York that Eartha Kitt for the first time heard jukebox music and jazz singers such as Billie Holiday and Billy Eckstine. Mamie Kitt insisted on piano lessons, but the two fought, with Eartha later complaining that Mamie "never felt any affection for me". Eartha Kitt took more and more to the streets and rooftops, dancing, sleeping rough and joining street entertainments, before appearing by chance at an audition for the performance school run by pioneering black dancer Katherine Dunham. It changed her life.
Her first appearance on the New York stage came in 1945 in a revue with the Dunham dance company. After the Broadway run, the revue crossed to spartan post-war England. She crossed the Channel, and landed her big break in Paris in 1951, when, after giving a spellbinding and largely improvised performance at a nightclub, she was spotted by Orson Welles, who cast her in his play Time Runs, based on the Faust legend. It was while learning French that Eartha Kitt discovered the rolled 'r' that would become key to her trademark 'grrr-owl'.
With her reputation growing, she was cast in 1952 in the Broadway revue New Faces, singing Monotonous. Her smouldering personality, husky voice and exquisite timing brought an immediate record contract, and in 1954 her first album came out. It included I Want to Be Evil, C'est si bon and what was to become her most recognised song, Santa Baby. In the same year she appeared in a Broadway drama called Mrs Patterson, about a poor girl who lived with her mother in America's deep south, winning a Tony nomination for the season's best dramatic actress. By then, however, she had already established herself as a film and television star, playing the lead role opposite Nat King Cole in the 1958 Saint Louis Blues. None of her screen work did much for her reputation beyond reaffirming her talent as a sinuous, sexy singer and dancer with a voice of furry innuendo, though in Mark of the Hawk, with Sidney Poitier, in 1958, she was able to express some of her feelings about racism.
Famous for the seductive feline "purr" she perfected in the role of Catwoman in the Batman TV series of the 1960s. Among her other films were Anna Lucasta (1958) with Sammy Davis Jnr, Up The Chastity Belt (1971), with Frankie Howerd, Friday Foster (1975), The Last Resort (1979), All By Myself (1982) and The Serpent Warriors (1985). In her later years she continued to work both on stage and screen. She co-starred with the comedian Eddie Murphy in the film Boomerang (1992), but seemed most happy on the cabaret stage, reprising old standards and less known works. In 2006 she even returned to the White House to light the Christmas decorations with President George W Bush, and in April this year she opened the Cheltenham Jazz festival.
A sad loss to a pure lady whom had many talents.
