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Eartha Kitt
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Eartha Mae Kitt (January 17, 1927[1]
– December 25, 2008)[2] 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."[3] She took over the role of Catwoman for the third season of the 1960s Batman television series, replacing Julie Newmar, who was unavailable for the final season.
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 2 Works
- 2.1 Discography
- 2.2 Filmography
- 2.3 Television work
- 3 Trivia
- 4 Footnotes
- 5 External links
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Biography
Kitt's mother was Black Indian with Cherokee ancestry, and her father was European-American. She was born (out of wedlock, as would have to be the case given the laws regarding miscegenation at the time) in tiny North, South Carolina, but jokes about the fact that many audiences assume her to be from somewhere more exotic. 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 her most recognizable hit, "Santa Baby." Kitt's unique style was enhanced as she became fluent in French during her years performing in Europe. She dabbled in other languages as well, which she demonstrates with finesse in many of the live recordings of her cabaret performances.
Kitt got her start as a member of the
Katherine Dunham Company and made her film debut with them in
Casbah (1948). 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. Orson 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 in succession to
Julie Newmar. This is 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 cry uncontrollably. Professionally exiled from the U.S., she devoted her energies to overseas performances. During that time cultural references to her grew, including outside the United States, such as the well-known Monty Python sketch ("the cycling tour") where an amnesiac believes he is first Clodagh Rogers, then Trotsky and finally Eartha Kitt (while performing to an enthusiastic crowd in Moscow). She returned 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 distinctively Eartha Kitt, one of the more memorable moments of the production. Equally memorable was her first entrance, which came after a long, dramatic, musical procession. Kitt entered seated atop the outstretched hand of former
Mr. World, bodybuilder
Tony Carroll. Her first line, perfectly purred in character, "I'm here" would literally stop the show each night, while the cast and orchestra waited for the audience applause and cheers to subside so that they could continue. Her nightly curtain call was also memorable, as it was a long, protracted, gymnastic, yet balletic, genuflection to the audience, that saw Kitt go completely to the floor, and from that position extend literally until her face touched her outstretched leg, and became parallel to the ground. From that position she would stand upright, using just one foot, and all without using her hands to balance herself. It was a stunning feat of dexterity, even for a lithe, younger person, but given her age at the time, was nothing short of extraordinary.
In 1984, she returned to hit music with a disco song, Where Is My Man (UK # 34); 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. Her 1989 follow-up hit "Cha-Cha Heels" (featuring Bronski Beat) received a positive response from UK dance clubs and reached #32 in the UK charts.
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 the late 1990s she appeared as the Wicked Witch of the West 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 returned to the role in the straight to video sequel Kronk's New Groove and the spin-off TV series The Emperor's New School, for which she won a 2006 Annie Award for Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production. She is currently doing other voiceover work such as the voice of Queen Vexus on the animated TV series My Life as a Teenage Robot.
In recent years, Kitt's annual appearances in New York have made her a fixture of the Manhattan
cabaret scene. She takes 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 emphasize a witty, mercenary world-weariness, and less familiar repertoire, much of which she performs with an unexpected ferocity and bite that present her as a survivor with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of resilience — her version of
Here's to Life, frequently used as a closing number, is 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.
From October to early December, 2006, Kitt co-starred in the Off-Broadway musical Mimi Le Duck. She has a role in the movie Somebody Like You, due out in 2007, and is voicing the character of Fossa in the animated movie Madagascar 2, due out in 2008.
She was married to Bill McDonald from 1960 to 1965 and had one child, a daughter, Kitt Shapiro.[4] Eartha has two grandchildren, Jason and Rachel. She lived for many years in Pound Ridge, NY, but recently moved to Connecticut to be near her daughter's family.
Works
Discography
- RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt - 10" LP album (mono) 1953
1. I Want To Be Evil 2. C'est Si Bon 3. Angelitos Negros 4. Avril Au Portugal 5. Uska Dara 6. African Lullaby 7. Mountain High - Valley Low 8. Lillac Wine. Issued on RCA Victor EPB 3062
- The best of all possible worlds - 12" stereo LP Stanyan Records
Filmography
- Casbah (1948)
- New Faces (1954)
- The Mark of the Hawk (1958)
- St. Louis Blues (1958)
- Anna Lucasta (1959)
- Saint of Devil's Island (1961)
- Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965) (voice only)
- Synanon (1965)
- All About People (1967) (short subject) (narrator)
- Up the Chastity Belt (1971)
- Friday Foster (1975)
- All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1983) (documentary)
- The Serpent Warriors (1985)
- The Pink Chiquitas (1987)
- Dragonard (1987)
- Master of Dragonard Hill (1989)
- Erik the Viking (1989)
- Living Doll (1990)
- Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)
- Boomerang (1992)
- Fatal Instinct (1993)
- Unzipped (1995) (documentary)
- Harriet the Spy (1996)
- Ill Gotten Gains (1997)
- I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
- The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story (1998) (voice)
- The Emperor's New Groove (2000) (voice)
- The Making and Meaning of We Are Family (2002) (documentary)
- The Sweatbox (2002) (documentary)
- Anything But Love (2002)
- Holes (2003)
- On the One (2005)
- Kronk's New Groove (2005) (voice)
Upcoming:
Television work
Trivia
Footnotes
- ^
Singer-actress Eartha Kitt dies at 81. MSNBC.COM (Dec. 26, 2008). Retrieved on Dec. 26, 2008.
- ^ "Eartha Kitt, sultry singer and dancer, dies at 81", Christmas, 2008. Retrieved on December 24, 2008.
- ^ Kate X Messer. "Just An Old Fashioned Cat", The Austin Chronicle, 2006-07-21. Retrieved on July 11, 2008.
- ^ Eartha Kitt with daughter Kitt and granddaughter Rachel Shapiro.
- ^ Pori Jazz official website - History 1988
