Eartha's gone.

Friday Cat Blogging will not be the same.

From the Reuters Obit:

Eartha Kitt, who rose from the Southern cotton fields to captivate audiences around the world with sultry performances as a singer, dancer and actress, died on Thursday at the age of 81.

[...]

Slinky, sensuous and cat-like, Kitt described herself as a "sex kitten" and used her seductive purr to charm audiences across the world.

Actor-director Orson Welles once called Kitt "the most exciting woman alive" and, along with Lena Horne, she was one of the first African-American sex symbols.

[...]

Her hit songs included "C'est Si Bon," "Let's Do It" and "Just an Old Fashioned Girl."...

[...]

Kitt was blackballed in America for speaking out against the Vietnam War in the 1960s -- most notoriously at a White House luncheon in the company of first lady Lady Bird Johnson. Kitt then began performing in Europe, where she had been popular early in her career, and eventually returned to the United States to great acclaim.

"She was never one to look back on her life," Freedman said. "She was a true individual who believed that if you had a true belief in yourself, your talent was authentic."

"My greatest challenge was to be able to survive in the business and to be able to survive according to what I was doing. Not what other people were doing," Kitt told Reuters in a 2005 television interview at the Newport, Rhode Island jazz festival.

"I just stuck to my own guns and I think that was one of the way's I have survived. The audience is not supposed to know that I'm scared, the shyest person in the world."

[...]

Kitt was born to a black-Indian mother and a white father on a plantation in South Carolina in 1927. She once described herself as "that little urchin cotton picker from the South, Eartha Mae" and often spoke of a tough childhood in the impoverished segregated South...

Oh, and Harold Pinter died...