Eartha Kitt Parents: Eartha Kitt, an American singer and actress born on January 17, 1927, and passed away on December 25, 2008, is best remembered for her 1953 recordings of “C’est si bien” and the holiday novelty tune “Santa Baby.”
After starting her career in 1942, Eartha Kitt participated in the first Broadway production of the musical Carib Song in 1945. She had six US Top 30 singles in the early 1950s, including “Uska Dara” and “I Want to Be Evil.” The UK Top 10 singles “Under the Bridges of Paris” (1954), “Just an Old Fashioned Girl” (1956), and “Where Is My Man” are among her other recordings (1983). She was referred to as the “most interesting woman in the world” by Orson Welles. In the third and last season of the television show Batman in 1967, she played Catwoman.
Her American career suffered in 1968 due to her anti-Vietnam War remarks at a luncheon hosted by the White House. Kitt successfully made her Broadway comeback ten years later in the 1978 original production of the musical Timbuktu!, for which she won the first of her two Tony Award nominations. Her second was for the musical The Wild Party premiere in 2000. Eartha Kitt penned three autobiographies.
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Through her parts in the Disney movies Holes and The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), in which she portrayed the evil Yzma, Eartha Kitt attracted a new audience (2003). She played Yzma again in the 2005 direct-to-video follow-up Kronk’s New Groove and the animated series The Emperor’s New School (2006–2008). She received two Daytime Emmy Awards for her efforts on the latter. After passing, she received a third Emmy for her appearance on Wonder Pets in 2010!
Who Are Eartha Kitt Parents?
On January 17, 1927, a little girl named Eartha Mae Keith was born in the South Carolina hamlet of North. Her mother, Annie Mae Keith, was of African and Cherokee ancestry. She didn’t know much about her father, but it was said that Kitt was raped before she was born and that her father was the farm owner’s son. Kitt’s father was allegedly a white man named Daniel Sturkie, a local doctor, according to a biography written by British writer John Williams in 2013.
Kitt’s daughter, Kitt Shapiro, contested the claim’s veracity. Eartha was reared by an aunt named Aunt Rosa, whose home she was abused when her mother, Annie Mae Keith (later Annie Mae Riley), moved up with a black man who was unwilling to accept her because of her relatively light skin tone.
After Annie Mae passed away, Eartha was moved to live with another relative named Mamie Kitt in Harlem, New York City, where she attended the Metropolitan Vocational High School. Mamie Kitt may have been Eartha’s birth mother (later renamed the High School of Performing Arts).
How Was The Personal Life of Eartha Kitt?
After having relationships with the banking heir John Barry Ryan III and the cosmetics tycoon Charles Revson, she married John William McDonald, a partner in a real estate investment firm, on June 6, 1960. On November 26, 1961, a girl named Kitt McDonald was born to them.
She was christened in the Catholic faith at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church. McDonald and Eartha Kitt divorced in 1965 after divorcing on July 1, 1964. Eartha Kitt, a longstanding resident of Connecticut, participated in numerous local charities and caused throughout Litchfield County while residing in a converted barn on a large farm in the Merryall neighborhood of New Milford.
She eventually relocated to Pound Ridge, New York. Still, to be closer to her daughter Kitt and her family, she moved back to Weston in southern Fairfield County, Connecticut. Charles Lawrence Shapiro and Kitt, her daughter, were wed in 1987.