Eartha Kitt was a pioneering legend of music, stage and screen. The icon influenced generations of singers and performers, from Diana Ross and the Supremes to Madonna. The daughter of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white father, in South Carolina, Eartha Kitt learned to pick cotton as a child. She was sent to New York City at a young age to live with an aunt. She began her career in the 1940s as a dancer and became, along with Lena Horne, one of the first African-American female sex symbols.

She conquered every entertainment media, from dance to cabaret to theater to television and film. Even her portrayal of Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman” was groundbreaking, as recurring roles for African-American actresses in 1960s TV were rare. In later years, her career showed no signs of slowing down; she performed cabaret as recently as 2007 when she was eighty.

Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing songs that became her signatures, like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for Sale.”

Eartha Kitt in 1960

Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous” (“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.

Eartha Kitt with Nat King Cole in “St. Louis Blues” (1958)

Shortly after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with pillow-talky voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna (who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987).

Eartha Kitt as Catwoman in the 1960s TV series Batman

Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her string of romances with rich or famous men, including Orson Welles, the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer, from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do two grandchildren. [...]

Eartha Kitt in 2006

In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career.

As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”

Source and image source: New York Times: Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81 Additional image sources: UPI and Rap-Up.com

Top photo: Eartha Kitt in 1960 on British television
See also: Washington Post, Reuters (via BoingBoing.net

Eartha Kitt – Santa Baby



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Eartha Kitt – I Want To Be Evil (Live Kaskad 1962)



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Eartha Kitt – C’est Si Bon (Live Kaskad 1962)



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Eartha Kitt Today Show Interview and performance of a song from her show Mimi Le Duck.



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Legendary Eartha Kitt (1927-2008) Video, Photo Tribute pics pictures