R.I.P. Eartha Kitt

Following closely the recent death of cult sex icon Bettie Page, Eartha Mae Kitt has passed away this morning at the age of 81 from colon cancer. Kitt was best beloved as the sexually charged and powerful black Catwoman on the 1960's TV series Batman and for her wild & husky 1953 rendition of the holiday song Santa Baby.  Kitt's genre film resume is also filled with horror and sci-fi film appearances like...

Lola Dede in the 2001 TV version of Anne Rice's Feast of All Saints, a cult leader in Ed Wood Jr.'s I Woke up Early The Day I Died, the goddess Freya in the Terry Gilliam fantasy Erik The Viking, and a Snake Preistess in 1985's The Serpent Warriors. Orson Welles once called her "the most exciting woman in the world" (and he'd slept with Rita Hayworth)...

Kitt recently released an album in October 2008 and won a 2008 Daytime Emmy for her work as  evil enchantress "YZMA" on the animated TV series The Emperor's New School.

Kitt was born working cotton fields in the Carolinas and raised herself to be a successful actress - she was one of the few artists to be nominated in the Tony, Grammy and Emmy award categories. She was also closely identified with the Manhattan cabaret scene in NYC.

Ms Kitt was blacklisted in the US in the late 1960s after speaking out against the Vietnam War at a White House function.

I know where Eartha Mae ends and Eartha Kitt begins," she said in an interview with CityPaper.net in 1997. "When I come offstage, Eartha Mae has had a lot of fun playing with the personality of Eartha Kitt and we both have had a lot of fun working with one another together onstage, but we separate when we leave. Once the makeup has come off and the wigs are gone and my costume is gone I go right back to being my ugly-duckling self."