| EARTHA
KITT (ARTIST BIOGRAPHY)
Eartha Mae
Kitt (January 17, 1927 - December 25, 2008), was an American actress,
singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her 1953
Christmas song “Santa Baby”. Orson Welles once called her the “most
exciting woman in the world”. She took on the role of Catwoman for
the fourth season of the 1960s Batman TV series, replacing Julie
Newmar who was unavailable for the final series.
Born in tiny North, South Carolina to Mamie Kitt, who was of
Cherokee and African-American descent, and an American father (surname
Kitt) of German and Dutch descent, she was raised by her maternal
aunt Anna Mae Riley, whom she believed was her mother up until after
Riley’s death, when she was sent to live in New York City with her
real mother.
Kitt began her career as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company
and made her film debut with them in Casbah (1948). A talented
singer with a distinctive voice, her hits include “Let’s Do It”,
“C’est Si Bon”, “Just an Old Fashioned Girl”, “Monotonous”, “Love
for Sale”, “I’d Rather Be Burned as a Witch”, “Uska Dara”, “Mink,
Schmink”, “Under the Bridges of Paris”, and arguably her most
recognizable hit, the sexily sung Christmas song “Santa Baby”. She
sang quite a few songs in French, a language she picked up during
her years performing in Europe, but she never lost her American
accent, which made her French songs sound rather amusing to native
French speakers. She dabbled in other languages as well, which she
demonstrated in many of the live recordings of her cabaret
performances.
In 1950, Orson Welles gave her her first starring role, as Helen of
Troy in his staging of Dr. Faustus. A few years later, she was cast
in the revue New Faces of 1952, introducing “Monotonous”, “C’est Si
Bon” and “Santa Baby”, three songs with which she continues to be
identified. During her run, 20th Century Fox filmed a version of the
play. Welles and Kitt allegedly had a torrid affair during her run
in Shinbone Alley, which earned her the nickname by Welles as “the
most exciting woman in the world”. In 1958, Kitt made her feature
film debut opposite Sidney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, Kitt would work on
and off in film, television and on nightclub stages. In the late
1960s television series Batman, she played Catwoman after Julie
Newmar left the role. This was the role for which she would best be
remembered, owing to her purring feline drawl.
In 1968, however, Kitt encountered a substantial professional
setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House
luncheon that reportedly made First Lady Lady Bird Johnson weep
uncontrollably. Professionally exiled from the U.S., she devoted her
energies to overseas performances before returning to New York in a
triumphant turn in the Broadway spectacle Timbuktu! (a version of
the perennial Kismet set in Africa) in 1978. In the musical, one
song gives a ‘recipe’ for mahoun, a preparation of cannabis, in
which her sultry purring rendition of the refrain “constantly
stirring with a long wooden spoon” was distinctive.
In 1984, she returned to hit music with a dance song, “Where Is My
Man”; the first certified Gold record of her career. Kitt found new
audiences in nightclubs across the country, including a whole new
generation of gay male fans, and she responded by frequently giving
benefit performances in support of HIV/AIDS organizations.
In 2000, Kitt again returned to Broadway in the short but notable
run of the revival of the 1920s-themed, The Wild Party, opposite
Mandy Patinkin and Toni Collette. In 2003, she replaced Chita Rivera
in Nine. In recent years she had also appeared as the Wicked Witch
in the North American national touring company of The Wizard of Oz.
One of her more unusual roles was as Kaa the python in a 1994 BBC
Radio adaptation of The Jungle Book. Kitt lent her distinctive voice
to the role of Yzma in Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove and also
did other voiceover work such as the voice of Queen Vexus on the
animated TV series My Life as a Teenage Robot. She continued her
role as Yzma on the spin-off TV series of The Emperor’s New Groove,
The Emperor’s New School.
In recent years, Kitt’s annual appearances in New York made her a
fixture of the Manhattan cabaret scene. She took the stage at venues
such as the Ballroom and, more recently, the Café Carlyle to explore
and define her highly stylized image, alternating between signature
songs (such as “Old Fashioned Millionaire”), which emphasized a
witty, mercenary world-weariness, and less familiar repertoire, much
of which she performed with an unexpected ferocity and bite that
presented her as a survivor with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of
resilience - her version of “Here’s to Life”, frequently used as a
closing number, was a sterling example of the latter. This side of
her later performances is reflected in at least one of her
recordings, Thinking Jazz, which preserves a series of performances
with a small jazz combo that took place in the early 1990s in
Germany, and which includes both standards (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”)
and numbers (such as “Something May Go Wrong”) that seem more
specifically tailored to her talents; one version of the CD includes
as bonus performances a fierce, angry “Yesterdays” and a live take
of “C’est Si Bon” that good-humoredly satirizes her sex-kitten
persona.
Personal life
Kitt was married to John William McDonald, an associate of a
real-estate investment company, from 1960 to 1965. They had one
child, a daughter, Kitt (b. 1962, married Charles Lawrence Shapiro);
and two grandchildren, Jason and Rachel Shapiro.
Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer on Christmas Day, December 25,
2008. |
