Versatile singer and actress Eartha Kitt has died aged 81.
Ms Kitt's outspokenness was a mainstay of her career but also led to a self-imposed exile to Europe in the 1960s and 70s after her stinging critique of the war in Vietnam.
She son two Emmy awards and was nominated for two Tony awards and a pair of Grammys.
She was being treated for colon cancer at a New York hospital at the time of her death, her friend and publicist Andrew Freedman said.
A self-described ‘sex kitten’, Kitt famously played the role of Catwoman in the US hit TV series Batman in the 1960s.
Her feline purr and uncanny persona won her millions of fans, among them Hollywood's Orson Welles, who called her ‘the most exciting woman in the world’.
She acted in movies as well, starring with Nat King Cole in St Louis Blues (1958) and with Sydney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk (1957).
‘I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt,’ she told The Times newspaper in April.
‘I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt is until the gods take me wherever they take me.’
I Want to Be Evil and Santa Baby, still a Christmas favourite today, were among her best-selling songs. She produced another hit in 1984 with the disco song Where is My Man.
Ms Kitt rose to fame from humble origins as a mixed-race child who grew up in South Carolina.
She launched her career as a dancer in Paris with the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. Before hitting age 20, she had already toured the world as a dancer with the company.
She was blacklisted in the US during the late 1960s after speaking out against the Vietnam war during a luncheon at the White House.
‘You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,’ she told a group of women hosted by Lady Bird Johnson in 1968. ‘No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.’
The FBI and CIA began investigating her, she learned later, and she spent the next several years working in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Manila.
Eartha Kitt worked abroad for years until her triumphant return to Broadway in 1974. She received her second Tony nomination in 1978 for her role in the musical Timbuktu. In 2003, she replaced Chita Rivera for a remake of the Broadway musical Nine.
In December 2006, she returned to the White House to light the National Christmas Tree alongside President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
In the sixth decade of her career, Ms Kitt, who married in 1960 and had one daughter before divorce, did not tire. She kept up her Broadway theatre work and continued her cabaret stints, performing at the reopening of New York's Cafe Carlyle in September 2007.
