Eartha Kitt

Eartha Mae Keith was born on the seventeenth of January 1927 on a cotton plantation near North, South Carolina, the natural daughter of Annie Mae Keith — a Black sharecropper — and an unknown white father. The DNA-based genealogical research her daughter Kitt Shapiro would conduct after her death established the father as a member of one of the white landowning families of Orangeburg County. She was abandoned by her mother at the age of four and was raised by her aunt Mamie Kitt — a piano teacher — and her aunt's family in Harlem from her eighth year. She was sent at fifteen on her aunt's recommendation to the New York School of Performing Arts.

She auditioned at sixteen for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and was accepted at sixteen — the youngest dancer in the company. She toured with the Dunham Company across Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, North Africa and Europe through her late teens. She left the Dunham Company at Paris in 1949 and accepted a residency at the Carroll's nightclub. Orson Welles cast her in his 1950 stage production of Time Runs at Paris, calling her — in the publicity material — "the most exciting woman in the world." She returned to New York in 1952 as the principal star of New Faces of 1952 at the Royale Theatre on Broadway, where she introduced the songs "Monotonous" and "Bal, Petit Bal."

She recorded her decisive solo album That Bad Eartha for RCA Victor in 1953 — including the recordings "Santa Baby," "C'est si bon," "I Want to Be Evil" and "Just an Old-Fashioned Girl" that established her international cabaret reputation. She sang in French, English, Spanish, Dutch, German and Turkish across her career and toured continuously through Europe, Africa, Australia and the Americas.

She played Catwoman in the third season of the ABC Batman series in 1967 — the first African American actress to play a major role in any superhero television series. She was effectively blacklisted from American work from 1968 to 1974 following her remarks against the Vietnam War at the White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson on the eighteenth of January 1968 — she had told the First Lady that "you send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed." She rebuilt her American career from 1974 onwards with the Tony-nominated Broadway revival of Timbuktu! in 1978 and the 1985 Broadway production of Follies in Concert.

She died of colon cancer at Weston, Connecticut, on the twenty-fifth of December 2008, at eighty-one.

She is honored here as the most recognisable voice of mid-century international cabaret.