Legendary smoky-voiced seductress Eartha Kitt has died at the age of 81. The actress and singer passed away in her home in Connecticut on Christmas day after a battle with colon cancer. She is best known for her 1953 hit “Santa Baby” and as Catwoman on the Batman television show in the 1960s. Ms. Kitt enjoyed a diverse career, working on Broadway and in cabaret well into her later years and earning a daytime Emmy award this year for voice work on the children’s animated show “The Emperor’s New School.”

Kitt had an incredibly difficult childhood in South Carolina. She never knew her father and her mother left her in the care of a family who abused her and forced her to work in the cotton fields. She moved to Harlem at the age of eight to live with a woman she thought was an aunt, but later learned was her biological mother. Her mother would beat her and she would run away and return several times as a teen, eventually leaving to work in a factory and sleep in the subway and on the roofs of buildings at night.

A friend told Kitt to audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, and she was accepted and began her journey to stardom. She made her film debut at the age of 21 in the film Casbah:

Eartha Kitt, the versatile American singer and actress who died at 81, mesmerized audiences worldwide for over six decades with her sultry voice and sensuality on stage and screen.

Kitt, whose outspokenness was a mainstay of her career but also led to a self-imposed exile to Europe in the 1960s and 70s after her stinging critique of the war in Vietnam, won two Emmy television awards and was nominated for two Tony awards and a pair of Grammys.

She was being treated for colon cancer at a New York hospital, her friend and publicist Andrew Freedman told AFP.

“She was certainly a legendary performer and while I think there may have been many imitations, she was an original,” Freedman said. She was one of the few artists nominated for Tony, Grammy and Emmy awards.

A self-described “sex kitten,” Kitt famously played the role of Catwoman in the US hit TV series “Batman” in the 1960s. Her feline purr and uncanny persona won her millions of fans, among them Hollywood’s Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world.”

She acted in movies as well, starring with Nat King Cole in “St. Louis Blues” (1958) and with Sydney Poitier in “The Mark of the Hawk” (1957).

“I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt,” she told the British newspaper The Times in April. “I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt is until the gods take me wherever they take me.”

“I Want to Be Evil” and “Santa Baby,” still a Christmas favorite today, were among her best-selling songs. She produced another hit in 1984 with the disco song “Where is My Man.”

Kitt rose to fame from humble origins as a mixed-race child who grew up in South Carolina’s cotton fields.

The performer spoke out about the rise of African-American artists.

“It’s time that people of color start to break into the area of being recognized for their work — not because of their color,” Kitt told a Washington Post online forum in 2005.

“It does encourage others of color that we’re getting there, that we’re progressing,” she said of recent Oscar wins by Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman.

But, Kitt said, “I don’t carry myself as a black person, but as a woman that belongs to everybody.”

[From AFP via Google]

Reading about Kitt’s incredible life, I learned that she was blacklisted in Hollywood in the late 1960s after she plainly told the first lady how she felt about the war. During a White House luncheon, Lady Bird Johnson asked Kitt about the Vietnam War, and she honestly responded that “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” Mrs. Johnson was left in tears and Kitt suffered a career setback for speaking her mind.

RIP Eartha Kitt. You will be deeply missed and fondly remembered.

The header is of Eartha Kitt performing on 4/28/08. Credit: WENN. She is also shown 2/3/06 at Fashion Week, on 10/31/05 at Bette Midler’s Hulaween ball, on 8/17/04 at a Meow Mix event, on 7/10/04 at a Broadway Barks Event, and on 3/7/04 at the TV Land Awards. Credit: PRPhotos

[Some factual details from NY Times and Wikipedia]

Here’s Eartha Kitt performing “I Want To Be Evil” in 1962

“Santa Baby”