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?? ?? | ?? | 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.
Eartha 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.
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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 Eartha??Kitt played Helen of Troy.
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Eartha 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”. |
