NEW YORK — Eartha Kitt, a sultry singer, dancer and actress who rose from South Carolina cotton fields to become an international symbol of elegance and sensuality, has died, a family spokesman said. She was 81.
Andrew Freedman said Kitt, who was recently treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, died Thursday in Connecticut of colon cancer.
Kitt, a self-proclaimed “sex kitten” famous for her catlike purr, was one of America’s most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and nabbing a third nomination. She also was nominated for several Tonys and two Grammys.
Her career spanned six decades, from her start as a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham troupe to cabarets and acting and singing on stage, in movies and on television. She persevered through an unhappy childhood as a mixed-race daughter of the South and made headlines in the 1960s for denouncing the Vietnam War during a visit to the White House.
Through the years, Kitt remained a picture of vitality and attracted fans less than half her age even as she neared 80.
Her first album, “RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt,” came out in 1954, featuring such songs as “I Want to Be Evil,” “C’est Si Bon” and the saucy gold digger’s theme song “Santa Baby,” which is revived on radio each Christmas.
In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy in the category of traditional pop vocal performance for her album “Back in Business.” She also had been nominated in the children’s recording category for the 1969 record “Folk Tales of the Tribes of Africa.”
Kitt also acted in movies, playing the lead female role opposite Nat King Cole in “St. Louis Blues” in 1958 and more recently appearing in “Boomerang” and “Harriet the Spy” in the 1990s.
On television, she was the sexy Catwoman on the popular “Batman” series in 1967-68, replacing Julie Newmar who originated the role. A guest appearance on an episode of “I Spy” brought Kitt an Emmy nomination in 1966.
“Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland,” she said in a 1996 Associated Press interview. “It depends so much on gadgetry and flash now. You don’t have to have talent to be in the business today.
“I think we had to have something to offer, if you wanted to be recognized as worth paying for.”
Harold Pinter was Nobel playwright
Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who addressed the isolation, fear and brutality of life in an original style that changed the face of 20th-century theater, has died. He was 78.
Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, died Wednesday, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, told The Associated Press in London. He had been in failing health in recent years, battling cancer of the esophagus as well as pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease.
His Nobel lecture, which he videotaped in England to be screened at the ceremonies, was a scalding critique of current U.S. and British policies in Iraq. Pinter was an outspoken pacifist throughout his adult life.
“Pinter was without question the most influential English playwright of the postwar,” New Yorker magazine critic John Lahr told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. “He streamlined the nature of the stage and changed the way we hear language.”
Along with approximately 30 plays, he wrote more than 20 screenplays, including adaptations of a number of his own works, such as “The Caretaker” (1963) and “Betrayal” (1983). He wrote other screenplays based on popular novels, among them “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, and “The Last Tycoon” (1976), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel.
Pinter’s most famous plays — “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker” and “The Homecoming” — move on spare dialogue that characters use like weapons against one another. Piercing language, significant pauses and an undercurrent of violence create an effect that critics termed “Pinteresque.”
“The essence of Pinter’s singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected,” playwright David Hare said in 2005. “You never know what the hell’s coming next.”
Pinter was born in London on Oct. 10, 1930, the only child of a Jewish tailor. Although some references trace his family heritage to Spain or Portugal, British critic Michael Billington, his biographer, clarified that Pinter’s grandparents emigrated from Poland and Odessa in what is now the southern Ukraine at the turn of the 19th century.
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