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Eartha Kitt

Eartha Mae Kitt (1927 – 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."

An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina. Kitt's mother was a sharecropper of African-American and Cherokee descent who became pregnant after being raped by a white plantation owner.  Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine. At 15, she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. However, by the 1950s, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on a European tour, soloing at a Paris nightclub and becoming the toast of the Continent. She also spoke out on hard issues. She took over the role of Catwoman for the third and final season of the television series Batman (1966), replacing Julie Newmar. Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer in her home in Weston, Connecticut, on Christmas Day 2008.

After expressing her negative views on the war in Vietnam at a White House luncheon, she was effectively blacklisted and didn't work in the States for fully a decade. Was virtually exiled from the United States after making anti-war statements during a White House luncheon with Lady Bird Johnson in 1968. However, she was welcomed back to the White House by Jimmy Carter who took office in January 1977.