With its 83-year history, the mythos of Batman contains multitudes. The dark knight detective of director Matt Reeves’s The Batman tracks with DC Comics’ Detective Comics stories from the 1970s, painting Gotham’s superhero as an avenging sleuth. But what of the aged Batman from comics’ original multiverse world Earth-Two, who marries Catwoman, settles into retirement, and passes the mantle to their daughter? Or the campy bam! biff! pow! Batman TV series starring Adam West? The original gun-toting Batman of the early ’40s? The infamous Rainbow Batman? Eight decades allows for a lot of detritus, and the folklore of Catwoman runs just as wide-spanning.
Since her creation in the first issue of Batman (1940), the essence of Catwoman is that of an antihero with a checkered past in burglary who carries on a sexually charged love-hate relationship with the caped crusader. But over the years, writers have penned Selina Kyle as a schizophrenic, amnesiac flight attendant; a dominatrix sex worker; a morally conflicted jewel thief; a bisexual crime boss; and notably, as an African American, over two films and one television show.
And why not? Nothing specific in Catwoman’s history precludes her from being a black woman. So for over 50 years,Selina Kyle has occasionally and casually shown up as African American, proving colorblind casting is nothing for fanboys to be up in arms about. This despite the habitually backwards tendencies of Hollywood casting directors. “[For The Dark Knight Rises], they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,’ ” Zoë Kravitz—the latest Catwoman in The Batman, out this week—once told Nylon. “It was like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I have to play the role like, ‘Yo, what’s up, Batman? What’s going on wit chu?’ ”
Well, something changed, placing Kravitz in a long lineage. With Kravitz’s already celebrated turn opposite Robert Pattinson in mind, here’s an abbreviated history of the black Catwoman.
Batman (1967)
Anyone remember the 1995 comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, with Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo dressed as drag queens on a cross-country road trip? A Tony-winning actress, Julie Newmar portrayed celluloid’s original Catwoman on the first two seasons of ABC’s Batman TV series. (Her skintight catsuit hangs in the Smithsonian.) A former Miss America, actress Lee Meriweather picked up the role in Hollywood’s Batman (1966), which ran in theaters while fans tuned into the TV show every Wednesday and Thursday nights. But in December 1967, the network exercised some colorblind casting, with singer-actress Eartha Kitt taking over as the program’s final Catwoman.
“Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill” marked Eartha Kitt’s debut as the first black Catwoman (though she appeared in an uncredited tease at the end of the previous episode). Kitt—born Eartha Mae Keith—was a sultry, refined multitalent who’d danced with the Katherine Dunham Company, acted in Orsen Welles’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, sang hits like “Santa Baby” and spoke four languages.
With Julie Newmar busy filming a (since-forgotten) Western entitled Mackenna’s Gold, Batman associate producer Charles Fitzsimons has said, “We felt it was a very provocative idea [to cast Eartha Kitt]. She was a cat woman before we ever cast her as Catwoman. She had a cat-like style. Her eyes were cat-like and her singing was like a meow. This came as a wonderful, offbeat idea to do it with a black woman.”
Television and movies sit comfortably outside fanboys’ expectations of what fits within comic-book canon and continuity. The show never mentioned Eartha Kitt Catwoman’s alter ego as Selina Kyle or provided any explanation as to why she’s suddenly a 5′ 4″ black woman, but her onscreen tenure was hardly without problematic incident. Eleven months before Star Trek’s first interracial kiss between Capt. James T. Kirk and Lt. Uhura, Batman erased the flirty tension between its titular hero and the first African-American Catwoman for obviously racist reasons. (The Supreme Court had only just struck down the country’s anti-miscegenation laws that summer with Loving v. Virginia.)
But Kitt’s entrancing Catwoman was still wickedly Catwoman, purring all of her rolling R’s through clenched teeth, petting cats on a leopard-upholstered throne and putting on a fittingly feline performance. On “Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill,” she attempts to steal a golden dress from the queen of Belgravia: “a million dollars’ worth of 24-karat gold cloth” she considers the single most valuable piece of clothing in creation. Flanked by goony henchmen in tiger-striped shirts and ascots, Catwoman then kidnaps Batgirl, attempting to bisect her with an oversized buzzsaw pattern cutter before she’s rescued by Batman butler Alfred Pennyworth.
“There’s not a lot of research to go into in order to be a cat,” Eartha Kitt told the Television Academy Foundation in 2002. “Who the hell knows what a cat is going to be like? [Catwoman] was one of the most wonderful bones that has ever been thrown to me, because it helped me grow back into being a successful name again. People recognize my name and still do because of Catwoman.”
Catwoman (2004)
Two years after winning the only Oscar ever awarded to an African American for Best Actress (2001’s Monster’s Ball), Halle Berry starred in what some regard as one of the worst comic book films ever made. Directed by Pitof (a French director who’d never helm another feature), Catwoman serves as the origin story for a character with nearly zero connections to the DC Comics source material, which is where its problems begin.
Berry plays Patience Phillips (not Selina Kyle), a mild-mannered graphic artist working for Hedare Beauty, a cosmetics company with an unscrupulous CEO about to send an addictive, toxic beauty cream to a Sephora near you. Phillips doesn’t live in Gotham City; the city is never named at all. Batman isn’t referenced either. Instead, her love interest is a detective (Benjamin Bratt, in a thankless role) who, Lois Lane style, can’t instantly figure out that Patience and Catwoman are the same athletically fit black beauty. Saved from death somehow by a cat (evidently a messenger from the Egyptian goddess Bastet), she develops superpowers Selina Kyle never possessed: enhanced agility, hyper senses and the ability to leap around a lot and squeeze through prison bars. Cue Catwoman’s revenge, served as cold as a can of Fancy Feast.
If you want to see Halle Berry kick ass, stream the most recent John Wick. Her Bond girl turn in Die Another Day works even better than Catwoman, with a plot you can actually tolerate. Battling baddie Laurel Hedare (actress Sharon Stone) to the bitter end before slinking over rooftops into the moonlight, the ending can’t come fast enough. Though viewers have given Catwoman a fairer shake lately—until Wonder Woman, the film still outperformed all other female-centered superhero movies—it honestly deserves every single Golden Raspberry (Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay…) it was awarded.
“I would totally change the story,” Berry told The Hollywood Reporter months ago. “I would change the characters. I would have Catwoman saving the world from some catastrophe like male comic book characters get to do. I wouldn’t be just saving women from their faces cracking off from some cream. I would make it more substantial, and I would set it in a grittier, more modern world.”
The Batman (2022)
Which brings us to Zoë Kravitz in this weekend’s The Batman, the most serious cinematic consideration of the Catwoman character to date. Michelle Pfeiffer commanded the role in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, full of innuendo, sex appeal and memorable one-liners (“you poor guys—always confusing your pistols with your privates”). Anne Hathaway’s equally exceptional Selina Kyle from The Dark Knight Rises, who was never explicitly called Catwoman, helped close out Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy with more pathos than Pfeiffer’s version: evolving from cat burglar antagonist to conflicted pawn to heroic protagonist. The Selina Kyle of The Batman is far more like a femme fatale from a Damon Runyon noir, and Zoë Kravitz rises to the occasion.
Kravitz’s Catwoman serves smoldering on-screen chemistry with Robert Pattinson’s Batman, sharing the first cinematic kisses of the star-crossed lovers’ relationship. A worker at the Penguin’s mob-connected 44 Below nightclub, her underworld connections run deeper than expected as she joins the world’s greatest detective to solve The Batman’s central mystery: who is the Riddler actually targeting and why?
A barely hinted at bisexuality plays out through concern for her blonde roommate, but there’s no real there there. And though the film makes the point that Selina Kyle is biracial, it also has her sound off about “white privileged assholes” while the Riddler turns online for henchmen straight out of the Patriot Boys. As her motorcycle rides off into the sunset, we definitely feel as if we’ve gotten a true-to-character Catwoman. Here’s hoping Zoë Kravitz’s rendition gets close to nine lives onscreen, in future sequels.