Stage and Screen Cats

Cats have long found employment in films, with walk-on roles that rarely demand acting ability. The 1958 film Bell, Book, and Candle has Kim Novak in the role of a witch who lives with a Siamese cat called Pyewacket.
 
The cat won a Patsy (Picture Animal Top Star of the Year) award for its performance. Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) features Audrey Hepburn's marmalade confidant "Cat," who is temporarily abandoned on New York's rain-swept streets.
 
Sheila Burnford's novel The Incredible Journey was filmed in 1963, and this tale of a cat and two dogs who travel hundreds of miles to return to their home was believed by many filmgoers to be a true story.

Paul Mazursky's touching film Harry and Tonto (1973) is the story of a widower, played by Art Carney, who is evicted from his New York home and travels to Chicago with his cat Tonto.

Both stars won awards for their roles. In The War of the Roses (1989) the feuding couple, played by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, have a cat and dog respectively The film implies that "cat people" should not marry "dog people."

Not surprisingly, given their long association with evil, cats are popular in horror films. From Mexico, where an aristocrat keeps man-eating cats in The Night of the Thousand Cats (1972), through Hollywood B movies such as Cat People (1942) and The Shadow of the Cat (1961), to the Black Cat(1985), an Italian film about a killer cat, the medieval image of the cat is perpetuated.

Cats fare better in science fiction films. In the 1978 film Superman, with Christopher Reeve in the starring role, the hero rescues a Devon Rex from a tree.

In the same year, Disney made The Cat from outer  Space, featuring a cat called Jake actually played by a female named Amber), who captains  a spaceship, and in 1979 a red tabby accompanied  Sigourney Weaver in Alien.
 
On stage and television, cats are more often played by people. The feline character Catwoman made her first screen appearance in the 1950s television version of Batman, and in the 1980s British space-comedy series Red Dwarf, the hip-cat character "Cat" evolves from the spaceship's feline.

On stage, the relatively minor role played by real cats has been more than made up for by the huge success of the musical Cats, based on T.S. Eliot's poems.