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.

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