Eartha Kitt,
who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording
studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that
lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in
Connecticut.The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.Ms.
Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New York,
went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long
before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles
famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early
’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her
onstage during a performance of
“Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust”
in which Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.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.”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.”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). 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 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. From practically the beginning of
her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to
describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or
“was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the
prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has
often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately, she was tapped
to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role
from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy. SOURCE:NYTIMES.COM