Singer’s search to discover more about her origins was frustrated by official secrecy

Kitt’s extraordinary life and elusive past has come under the spotlight five years after her death, with publication of a biography called America’s Mistress: Eartha Kitt, Her Life and Times by British journalist John Williams.

The world-famous singer came from a dirt-poor background and only found out her date of 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 when she was 71. But according to her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, who chose not to co-operate with the biography, when Eartha launched a legal fight to gain access to the 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 certificate she fell victim to a cover-up by officials. The singer, who died in 2008, wept when she set eyes on the certificate in 1998, only to find that her father’s name had been blacked out, said Shapiro, her only 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, who had accompanied her mother. Shapiro said in an interview with the Observer: “My mother was 71 at the time and it was approaching the 21st century, and yet they were still protecting the name of the father even though he was clearly dead. They were protecting the white man because they would not have gone to that trouble to protect a black man. The courts still held it as legal to withhold the documentation. We were amazed. My mother assumed it was their dirty little secret.”

Once called the “most exciting woman in the world” by Orson Welles, Kitt became a singer and dancer whose suggestive and sensuous performances captured the public imagination in the 1950s. Her former lover Charles Revson, the billionaire founder of Revlon cosmetics, even created a lipstick for her, calling it Fire and Ice. In the 1960s she made the role of Catwoman her own when she became the first black woman to achieve mainstream TV success in America with Batman, even breaking racial taboos by flirting on screen with Adam West in the lead role.