Purring Cinema: The five greatest movie cats

Posted On May 25, 2024May 25, 2024

It’s often the case that people tend either to be in favour of cats or dogs and throughout cultural history, the medium of cinema has thrown up many brilliant performances from both canines and felines, with such animals often even stealing the show from their human counterparts.

In terms of dogs, there have been the likes of Lassie from the titular movies, Toto from The Wizard of Oz, and more recently, Messi from Anatomy of a Fall. But dogs haven’t always taken the limelight when it comes to pets on the big screen because cats have also taken on their fair share of the load.

The naturally mischievous cat can provide moments of sheer comedy when causing havoc in a movie, but it can also offer up a moment of tenderness when times get hard. Of course, let’s not forget that cats can also just be so goddamn cute that they sometimes captivate an audience’s attention even when they’re not meant to.

We’ve compiled a list of the best cats to ever arrive on screen throughout cinematic history, from comedy capers to cute animations and on to felines that seem to possess a remarkable ability to survive. So retract those claws and empty the litter tray; it’s time to paw through the best movie cats of all time.

Five best cats in the history of cinema:

Mr. Jinx from Meet the Parents

Having given so many intense and fearsome performances through the second half of the 20th century, Robert De Niro began the third millennium with a brilliant comic role. Playing the unforgiving father of Ben Stiller’s character’s girlfriend, Jack Byrnes has a beloved Himalayan cat whom he almost treats like one of his own children.

Mr. Jinx, like his former-CIA interrogator owner, does his best to torture the life out of Greg Focker and makes him look like an absolute moron unfit to marry his girlfriend. Robert De Niro had felt that Mr. Jinx had real star quality and called for him to be given more screen time, leading to even more feline madness.

Puss in Boots from Shrek 2

Several iconic characters have arrived as a result of Shrek, but as far as feline legends go, it’s hard to look beyond the brilliance of dear old Puss in Boots. Arriving on screen for the first time in 2004’s Shrek 2, voiced by Antonio Banderas, Puss in Boots eventually got his own celebrated movie, the eponymous effort of 2011.

Based loosely on the classic fairy tale of the same name with several inflexions of some of the great archetypal heroes like Zorro and Indiana Jones, Puss in Boot is capable of being at once suave, charming and sophisticated and manipulatively cute, just as real-life cats so often are.

Mr. Bigglesworth from Austin Powers

Though it’s considered well-dated by today’s standards, there was a point at which the Austin Powers movies were the cream of comedy’s crop. The parody of the spy film genre saw the villain Dr. Evil arrive on screen as a satire of the classic James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Blofeld, who first appeared in From Russia With Love, was known for stroking his fluffy white Persian cat as he revealed his heinous plans, so, of course, Dr. Evil just had to have a completely hairless cat called Mr. Bigglesworth, who is just as sinister as his owner. According to Dr. Evil, when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, “people die.”

Don Corleone’s cat from The Godfather

The next iconic cinema cat finds itself on this list as a mere stroke of good fortune. As with Blofeld, Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone, can be spotted stroking his little feline friend, and he hears the requests of his associates. But the cat hadn’t actually been written into the script.

Coppola himself had later explained, “The cat in Marlon’s hands was not planned for. I saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in his hands without a word.” The legendary director just knew that by putting a cat in the lap of Corleone, it would imbue the character with a sense of humanity and empathy, making his eventual death all the more moving.

Jonesy from Alien

Considered one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made, Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien features a cat of genuinely heroic proportions. Brought aboard the Nostromo to take care of its rodent problem, Jonesy the cat ended up being one of the only two creatures to survive the movie’s harrowing plot, alongside Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley.

The claustrophobic space film’s fearsome xenomorph antagonist had trapped Jonesy in a cage at one point, but the clever feline still managed to escape and found restful slumber in hypersleep with Ripley at the movie’s conclusion. 57 years later, Jonesy awoke for the sequel movie by James Cameron and found itself to have become a true icon of horror cinema.

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