'We had to eat whatever we could dig out of the ground': How Eartha Kitt rose from 'extreme poverty' to superstardom

With her sultry drawl and feline charisma, the singer and actor oozed sophistication. But Eartha Kitt, who was born on 17 January 1927, had the toughest of childhoods. In History looks at how she transcended her troubled beginnings to become a star of stage and screen – and the first black Catwoman.

Celebrated by Orson Welles as the "most exciting woman in the world", and smeared by the CIA as a "sadistic nymphomaniac", Eartha Kitt had an extraordinary life and career. After joining Katherine Dunham's pioneering African-American dance company, she was on Broadway by the age of 19, and went on to become a cabaret sensation in London and Paris. Her smouldering 1950s performances of songs such as Santa Baby, Just an Old-Fashioned Girl and I Want to be Evil have never been bettered. In 1967, she wowed mainstream television audiences as Catwoman in the third series of the camp classic Batman. Later, she won a new generation of fans as the villain Yzma in Disney's 2000 cartoon The Emperor's New Groove. She died on Christmas Day in 2008, aged 81.

Born Eartha Mae Keith on a South Carolina cotton plantation on 17 January 1927, she had a start in life that could hardly have been more difficult. She never knew her father, and her mother left her to be raised by various relatives. Speaking on BBC Wales' Late Call in 1971, she said: "I remember at times when we didn't have anything to eat for what seemed like an insurmountable amount of time. We had to rely on the forest and whatever we could dig out of the ground, such as weeds or a grass I remember that had a kind of onion growing at the bottom of it. And when we could find things like that to eat then we were alright."

Describing her childhood self as an "urchin", she said: "I'm very glad that she will always be a part of me because she helps me do what she knows I have to do out there on that stage."

Despite being such a confident and poised performer, raw emotion was never far from the surface when Kitt was interviewed, as shown when Ronnie Williams, the host of Late Call, read her one of her quotes: "You said, 'My mother gave me away at the age of five, and if my mother gives me away, she doesn't want me. So why should anybody want me?'" Kitt replied that because of this abandonment, she had always lived with the feeling "that the most important person in the world didn't want you". She added: "I think there are many explanations I can make for my mother giving me away and I think that, even though I have tried to explain within myself as to why she gave me away, it's still very difficult for me to accept it."

Decades later, Kitt's beloved daughter Kitt Shapiro revealed that the singer died without knowing the identity of her white father. She told the Observer in 2013 that her mother wept when she finally saw her birth certificate, only to discover that the man's name had been blanked out by officials to protect his reputation in the segregated American South.

Because of her mixed heritage, Kitt told Williams on Late Call that she was not accepted by the black community. She said: "They don't understand that I don't think of myself in terms of being a black person. I think of myself as being a person who belongs to everybody, but I think one should always feel this way. I think that, as long as you are feeling in terms of belonging only to one race, one nationality, one religion, that you have to be prejudiced… I am an illegitimate child, and at the same time I was not of completely black parentage. My father was supposedly a Caucasian, and my grandparents are Cherokee Indians. My mother was half black and all of this, and therefore my blood is of yours and of anybody's and therefore I've always thought of myself as this, and to be prejudiced against any of the other bloods is rather silly to me."

According to Kitt, her travels had convinced her that financial inequality was at the root of so much prejudice around the world: "When we are able to recognise that no matter what colour or religion you belong to, that you are capable of gaining as much as the next person can, no matter what race or religion he belongs to, I think the situation would be much healthier."

The singer and actor was being interviewed on BBC Wales to promote her week-long residency at the Double Diamond Club in Caerphilly, a scenic town near Cardiff. While the popular venue did in its time host big stars such as Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, it was still a long way from Broadway.

In the US at that time, Kitt was cancelled. Her career had faltered following a White House luncheon in 1968 to discuss the causes of juvenile delinquency with Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon B Johnson. As protests against the Vietnam War raged across the US, Kitt's diagnosis of the problem's causes upset the genteel audience. She told the First Lady: "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."

In response, the CIA compiled a dossier on her. The New York Times revealed in 1975 that this extensive report contained "second‐hand gossip about the entertainer but no evidence of any foreign intelligence connections". Asked in later years about the notorious "nymphomaniac" claim reported to be contained in the document, Kitt was supremely dismissive: "What has that got to do with the CIA if I was?"

While her career back home was in the doldrums, she spent time in Britain touring provincial clubs. During one such residency at the distinctly unglamorous Batley Variety Club in West Yorkshire, a BBC reporter asked her how such a sophisticated celebrity could feel an affinity with local people there. She replied: "I wasn't born in such a different world. I came out of extreme poverty. I have acquired things, yes. The things have not acquired me."

It wasn't until 1978, ten years after that White House incident, that Kitt made her triumphant Broadway return in the musical Timbuktu!. She remained a frequent visitor to Britain, often making outrageous appearances on television talk shows. Again, her vulnerability was never too far from the surface. In one spectacular 1989 BBC appearance, she began by resting her feet flirtatiously on the lap of host Terry Wogan. Just a few minutes later, she was confessing that her public persona was nothing like her private self.

She said: "Mr Wogan, you know something? I'm not an extrovert. I can tease as 'Eartha Kitt', but as Eartha Mae? Forget it. I'm hiding behind the bushes, behind the chairs, behind everything I could possibly find to hide behind, because I've never had that kind of security within Eartha Mae that makes me feel that she will ever be accepted."

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Kitt's abiding loves were her fans and her daughter. Having been abandoned by her own mother, Kitt insisted on bringing her daughter with her all over the world. Her marriage to businessman Bill McDonald in 1960 lasted less than four years, and she never remarried. Asked by Wogan if she had been reluctant to let her guard down, she said: "A man has always wanted to lay me down, but he never wanted to pick me up."

She said that it was the love she received from adoring crowds that "makes me feel that I really am a worthwhile person". However, she also explained: "When I go back to the dressing room, I take off the makeup and I'm not 'Eartha Kitt' anymore, I'm Eartha Mae again."

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