(BBC News) – American singer, dancer and actress Eartha Kitt has died at the age 81, her friend and publicist has said.

Kitt died of colon cancer on Thursday, Andrew Freedman said.

She was one of the few artists to be nominated in the Tony, Grammy and Emmy award categories and was a stalwart of the Manhattan cabaret scene.

She famously played Catwoman in the Batman television series in the 1960s and was known for her distinctive, feline drawl.

She also had a number of hit songs, including Old Fashioned Girl, C’est Si Bon and Santa Baby.

Kitt was blacklisted in the US in the late 1960s after speaking out against the Vietnam War at a White House function.

She also caused controversy when she toured apartheid South Africa in 1974, arguing that she had helped wean the regime by raising awareness of racism.

However, she returned triumphantly to New York’s Broadway in a 1978 production, Timbuktu!, and continued to perform regularly in theatre shows and concert halls.

From the 1980s onwards she appeared in numerous films, and her 1984 hit Where Is My Man found her another generation of night club fans.

Big break

Kit rose to the top of the entertainment world from humble origins.

Her mother worked on a cotton plantation in South Carolina and was just 14 when she gave birth.

Kitt was then given away at the age of eight and sent to live with an aunt in New York.

Her break came at 16 when she got a job as a dancer with a professional troupe touring Europe. She later sang in Paris nightclubs and appeared in several films in the 1950s.

Kitt, who had one daughter from a brief marriage in the 1960s, lived in the US state of Connecticut.

(Source: BBC NEWS | Americas | US singer Eartha Kitt dies at 81.)

Time magazine has given its annual Person of the Year award to US President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr Obama was awarded the title “for having the confidence to sketch an ambitious future in a gloomy hour,” said the US-based magazine.

It said he showed “the competence that makes Americans hopeful he might pull it off”.

Recent winners have included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the American soldier and the online public.

Time told readers it was “unlikely that you were surprised to see Mr Obama’s face on the cover”.

“He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago.

“He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order.”

Mr Obama has featured on the magazine’s cover 15 times in the past two years.

“We would have had to have had some pretty compelling reasons to not chose President-elect Barack Obama,” Michael Elliot, Time’s international editor, told CNN.

“His is an extraordinary story which has captured the imagination of people from Jakarta to Dublin to Iowa to New Hampshire.

“There is a degree of excitement surrounding Barack Obama which we tried to capture in our choice,” Mr Elliot said.

(Source: BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama named ‘Person of the Year’.)

Editorial:

That’s not surprising.  Now if this brotha wins an Oscar… that’d be impressive.  Hell, he already won a Grammy.  I think he should go ahead and vie for every award possible.  Nobel, Peabody, Pulitzer, Emmy, Tony, etc.  Why not?!