Lee Meriwether stepped into the Catwoman's ears when Julie Newmar could not, and played the part straighter than anyone around her. Playing it straight, on television far more than in cinemas, became the career.
Fi1m perspective
In Batman (1966), Lee Meriwether has two jobs. As the Catwoman she is one of four villains crammed into a hideout, wearing the ears and taking her turn at the hissing. As Kitka, a Soviet reporter, she has to seduce Bruce Wayne, and she plays that seduction straight, at a pitch the film around her never attempts. Adam West is doing his deadpan and the other villains are winking at the camera; Meriwether looks at Wayne as if she means it. It is a small thing and it is why the scenes work.
She came to the part by way of a title. She won Miss America in 1955 while a student at City College of San Francisco, and the crown got her onto television, including The Today Show, before it got her into films. The Catwoman was a stand-in job; Julie Newmar was unavailable and Meriwether took the ears. The same year she began a regular part as Dr Ann MacGregor in Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel (1966–67), and in 1969 she turned up in Star Trek as Losira. The beauty-queen label followed her for a while, and interviewers of the time noted it; it faded once the work spoke for itself.
The work, mostly, was television, and mostly it was steady. Her longest run was as Betty Jones in Barnaby Jones (1973–80), eight seasons opposite Buddy Ebsen, and what people remembered from it was loyalty and an easy way with a co-star, not fireworks. Later there was The Munsters Today (1988–91) as Lily Munster, soap work on All My Children, voice roles and a one-woman show; she was still working around 2020, and by her own account the stage was where she would rather have been. We have reviewed only the one film, so we will not pretend to a verdict on decades we have not watched.
What we can say is this. Asked how she got the Catwoman, Meriwether said: "I raised my voice three registers, curled up in a chair, licked my hand and did 'meow's." That is the audition. The performance is nearly the opposite: quieter than Gorshin's Riddler, harder-edged than the other Catwomen of the period, and the least camp of the villains. In a film that had made us laugh for an hour and then sat down, we noticed we were waiting for her scenes with Wayne, because she still appeared to want something and the film around her had stopped. It is the one part of the villains' business that does not sag.
The Batman film is where to start and, for most people, where they will stop. If you want more of her, it is on television, in bulk, and that is where she did the greater part of her working life.
Biography
Lee Meriwether is an American actress. She won the Miss America pageant in 1955 while studying radio, television and theatre arts at City College of San Francisco. After her reign she began working in television, including an early role on the Today show.
She is known for playing Catwoman (also credited as Kitka) in the 1966 film Batman. Other notable television roles include Dr Ann MacGregor in The Time Tunnel (1966–67), Betty Jones in Barnaby Jones (1973–80), for which she received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, and Lily Munster in The Munsters Today (1988–91). She has also appeared in episodes of Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Murder, She Wrote.
