Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81

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.

Ms. 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 like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.

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 Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy....

...As Ms. Kitt began the sixth decade of her career, she was still active. In 2000 she received her second Tony nomination, for best featured actress in a musical in “The Wild Party.” Branching out into children’s programming, she won two Daytime Emmy Awards, this year and in 2007, as outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as the scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.”

All the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having maintained her voice and shapely figure through a vigorous fitness regimen that included daily running and weight lifting. Even after discovering in 2006 that she had colon cancer, she triumphantly opened the newly renovated Café Carlyle in New York in September 2007. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, said that Ms. Kitt’s voice was “in full growl....”

Some entertainer always has to die around Christmas. I wish it wasn't Ms. Kitt's time.

If you celebrate, have a wonderful Christmas day! ( Ho ho ho! )

If you don't, put your feet up, enjoy the day off, and there's a Law & Order marathon on TNT!

I survived the shopping center parking lot! Silly me, decided to just "pop in" to PetSmart for crunchies and litter for the cats. There is no such thing as "popping in" to a store that shares a parking lot with both Wal-Mart and Best Buy! But I made it out alive.

I am now home, watching my favorite version of Christmas Carol, the TV version from the '80s with George C. Scott!

I should probably wrap my brother's Christmas presents, but meh. It'll get done at some point!

Hubby's fancy office Christmas party was actually not as fun as our little pre-party get-together at the new swankified Chateau Froggenhall! We worked like mad cleaning, tree trimming and getting organized all afternoon, and the house looked WONDERFUL. That made me happy!