American jazz singer and actress Eartha Kitt has died. Perhaps best-known for her role as Catwoman in the 1960s series ‘Batman’, the 81-year-old singer and cabaret star had been suffering from colon cancer.

Orson Welles once called her ‘the most exciting girl in the world’. She called herself ‘the original material girl’. “My greatest challenge was to be able to survive in the business, and to be able to survive according to what I was doing,” Kitt said recently. “I just stuck to my own guns and I think that was one of the ways I have survived. I didn’t follow the herd. I stuck to my own path.” Born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, she says she was the product of rape. She sang her way out of poverty. It is perhaps fitting she died on Christmas Day, given her best known hit was ‘Santa Baby’.More about: USA

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