Catwoman’s story began alongside the Caped Crusaders in the very first comic Batman #1 (DC Comics, 1940). Since then, there’s been no shortage of remarkable performances throughout the years. Catwoman has been one of the most important characters in the Dark Knight’s saga. In this article, we look back at the actresses who played the fierce feline famous for her whip and wit.

Julie Newmar

 

Julie Newmar played the very first Catwoman, alongside Adam West in the Batman TV  series, despite having never heard of the character before auditioning. Before Batman, the ballerina turned actress’ first roles in film and TV were mostly uncredited dance roles in the 1950s. She made appearances on a couple of TV shows, including The Twilight Zone, in 1963.

 

Newmar appeared in the first two seasons of the Batman TV series, as the relatively short-lived show that ran from 1966 to 1967. It was due to her role in Mackenna’s Gold that she was unable to play Catwoman in the third season. Newmar stated that she focused on the femme fatale aspects of her character and on portraying a remorseless manipulator. She would later famously mention how satisfying it felt to be “mean, bad and nasty.”

 

In 2003, Newmar took on another Batman production, a TV movie called Return to the Batcave. In 2016 she did the same for the animated movie Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders.

Lee Meriwether

 

The twice-weekly Batman TV series was a monster hit. It didn’t take long for filmmakers to come up with a theatrical spin-off that was shot between the show’s first and second seasons. By 1966, Newmar was unavailable to play Catwoman, so, they cast Golden Globe nominee and former Miss America 1955 winner Lee Meriwether instead. It was her first major on-screen acting performance.

 

Meriwether said that, when she went in to audition, she was afraid she wouldn’t stand out: “I looked around at this room of actresses waiting to read. Some very well-known, some not so well-known, or at least not to me anyway. (…) I said, they aren’t going to remember me from Adam. I thought ‘I have to do something.’ (…) So, I changed my voice pattern. I talked up a little higher. When I started as Catwoman I dropped my voice down.”

 

The former beauty pageant starred alongside legendary supervillain actors Cesar Romero (The Joker), Burgess Meredith (Penguin) and Frank Gorshin (Riddler). In an interview with Fox News in 2018, Meriwether said how lucky she felt to be working with such a talented group of villains: “I learned so much from those gentlemen. Their attack on those characters and the work that they did … I would always watch them, and it was quite an education. I was so grateful for that time. Still am. I learned a lot on how to conduct yourself on set. That was really my first major film in a big studio. And they were wonderful teachers.”

Eartha Kitt

 

Eartha Kitt appeared in the third and final season of the Batman series, in 1968. The actress had made her debut in Orson Welles’ Time Runs, in 1950. Welles was so fond of her, he dubbed her “the most exciting woman in the world.”

 

Playing a sexy Catwoman was a dream come true for Kitt. “That character, to me, was so much fun. I was in dire need of tremendous help in 1967 and, like a starving cat, I had to find a way to survive. Being cast in Batman helped me grow back into being a successful name again. People recognized my name, and still do, because of Catwoman,” Kitt told the Television Academy during a nearly hour-and-a-half hour Archive interview.

 

During the Maury Povich TV show on June 19, 1992, Kitt talked about being the first Black Catwoman on screen: “I thought it was one of the pioneering things that had happened in television and more of that kind of thing should be happening now. It affected the young people very strongly because they were very proud of the fact that a Black person was in a show where they didn’t think about her being Black.”

Michelle Pfeiffer

 

Golden Globe winner Michelle Pfeiffer portrayed Selina Kyle/Catwoman in the 1992 sequel Batman Returns, alongside Golden Globe winners Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito. The role initially went to another actress, leaving Pfeiffer utterly disappointed: “When I heard that Tim (Burton) was making the film and Catwoman had already been cast, I was devastated. At the time, it was [Golden Globe Winner] Annette Bening. Then she became pregnant. The rest is history. I remember telling Tim halfway through the script that I would do the film. That’s how excited I was,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in June of 2017.

 

In the same interview, Pfeiffer explained how she trained for months to master the whip and kickboxing. She went on to perform all of her stunts with the whip. “I was very nervous on my first day of shooting. I’d gotten pretty good with the whip. But, when you show up, you don’t anticipate all the lights everywhere. They were set up in places that prevented me from hitting my marks with the whip. So, we had to rework the lighting again and again.”

 

Batman Returns was so successful that there were rumors of a standalone Catwoman movie. It would never happen for Pfeiffer. During an interview with Hoda Kotb on the Today show in 2019, Pfeiffer admitted she was disappointed that the film never came to fruition: “I was sad when that ended. I was just getting comfortable with everything that I had to deal with and beginning to have some fun with it and then it was over.”

Halle Berry

 

Golden Globe winner Halle Berry starred in the standalone Catwoman movie in 2004. The film, however, turned out to be a box office disaster, grossing $82 million against a budget of $100 million. It currently holds a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

Even though Berry, who had just won an Oscar for Monster’s Ball in 2002, was looking forward to taking on the famed feline role, her friends warned her against the decision. “Everybody around me said, ‘Girl, don’t do it. It’s going to be the death of you. It’s going to end your career.’ But guess what I did? I followed my intuition, and I did a movie called Catwoman and it bombed miserably,” Berry told Glamour magazine in April 2018.

 

Catwoman won multiple Golden Raspberry Awards, including ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Actress.’ The actress notably attended the show (which highlights the worst cinematic projects each year) with her Oscar in hand. “As you can imagine, I want to f*cking slap the sh*t out of these Razzie people that brought me here tonight. But I won’t do that. I’ll do what my mother taught me and stand here graciously. I’ll take the criticism. Take it as a lesson learned. And I hope to God I never see these people ever again.” She set her Razzie on fire afterward.

Anne Hathaway

 

2012 was a very exciting year for Golden Globe winner Anne Hathaway. She had just won an Oscar for her performance in Les Misérables when she made her debut as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, opposite Golden Globe winner Christian Bale as Batman. Hathaway worked out five days a week to prepare for her role, which included stunt training and dance lessons: “I’ve always thought that (being) skinny was the goal, but with this job I also have to be strong,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2011.

 

In 2019, Hathaway revealed to BBC Radio that she initially thought that she was auditioning for the part of Harley Quinn: “I came in and I had this lovely Vivian Westwood kind of beautiful but mad-tailoring top with stripes going everywhere. And I wore these flat Joker-y looking shoes. And I was trying to give Chris (Nolan, the director) these crazy little smiles. About an hour into the meeting he said, ‘Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but it’s Catwoman.’” It ultimately took three months of auditioning to land the coveted role.

Camren Bicondova

 

Camren Bicondova played the younger version of Selina Kyle on the Fox prequel series Gotham, which premiered in 2014. Bicondova was only 15 years old when she took on the role. We get to see the character as a teenage street thief and orphan who witnesses the murders of the Waynes, years before she turns into Catwoman.

 

Just like Anne Hathaway, the actress and dancer had no idea that she was up for the role of Kyle. “I thought I was auditioning for a girl named Lucy,” she told film website Collider back in 2014. When I found out that I got the role of Selina Kyle, I completely freaked out. I knew Selina Kyle was Catwoman. I didn’t know the details, but Catwoman is pretty cool.” In the same interview she admitted that she wasn’t familiar with DC Comics and the Batman world before she got cast: “But now that I’ve been researching, it’s just great. I’m really excited to be part of it.”

 

Bicondova received critical acclaim for her first year on the show. She continued playing Kyle for five seasons. She did not appear in the series finale because the storyline jumped ahead ten years, showing flash-forward scenes of all of the iconic characters in their full glory.

Zoë Kravitz

 

Zoë Kravitz is the latest actress to step into the classic Catwoman suit for The Batman, which premiered on March 4. In 2015, the Big Little Lies star told Nylon magazine that she couldn’t get an audition for Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises: “In the last Batman movie they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban’. 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?’”

 

When Kravitz got a call from her agent, about auditioning for Matt Reeves’ The Batman, she purposefully kept her expectations in check. “One thing I have had to learn from an early age is: when you get attached, it’s hard, and most of the time you don’t get the part,” she told Elle magazine.

 

In another interview with AnOther Magazine, Kravitz recalled how she went to Los Angeles and met with the director, who also wrote the script. “It was important to give him an idea of what it’s really like to work with me. To say what I really think and, if we’re on set together, to ask the questions I want to ask. I tried to come at it from the angle where I am showing him what I see and feel about this character. I believe that’s how it happened, and I got the role.”

 

Kravitz was so committed to the role that she worked out for three hours a day after filming all day. “Obviously, you want to look good in a catsuit, but I wanted it to be realistic that I’m able to do anything in this film. I had to be strong. I got stronger than I have ever been. It felt good to see what I’m capable of. I felt confident. And I could kick some ass.”