OVIE DIRECTORS,
once in a while, can
come to blows with their stars. Just ask Werner
Herzog or David O. Russell. But when Jean-
Jacques Annaud got on the wrong side of his
top-billed actor while making 1988 wilderness
adventure The Bear, he risked far more than
a cut lip or bruised ego. His lead performer was
nearly three metres tall, weighed more than
635kg, and was strong enough to snap him in half
like a stale baguette.
During one lunchbreak while shooting
in the Italian Dolomites, Annaud’s on-set
photographer pointed out that they didn’t
have any good photos of the director with Bart
The Bear, a raised-in-captivity Kodiak grizzly
(Ursus arctos horribilis) cast by Annaud as
a wild brown bear stalked by human hunters.
The French fi lmmaker agreed and, reasoning
that “this bear is my star and my friend”, entered
Bart’s compound under the close supervision of
animal trainer Doug Seus. As the photographer
started snapping, Annaud thought it would look
cool if he turned and pointed his viewfi nder
at Bart. In so doing, he either momentarily
forgot or wilfully ignored Seus’ oft-repeated
instructions to never project himself forward
at the creature.
“He struck me a strong blow with his right
paw,” Annaud later told the Los Angeles Times.
“I was thrown fl at on my face. Then he was on
me. I just protected my ears, my eyes, and played
dead as best I could. For a few seconds, I had the
impression that I was living the climax of my
own movie.” It took Seus three seconds to call
Bart off the possum-playing auteur. To Annaud
it felt like an hour, during which he claims to
have suff ered a minor puncture wound in his
lower back.
Still, he didn’t hold it against Bart. “I blame
myself for being too confi dent and making
that sudden move,” he said. The director had
auditioned around 50 bears for the role, but
only Bart possessed all the qualities he sought.
“Bears are like men,” Annaud believed. “Some
are the Peter O’Toole style, some are the Sean
Connery style, some are the Mickey Rooney
style. I wanted the John Wayne type.” A bear
whose rugged individualist swagger and fi ery
glare belied a big, warm heart.
During his 21-year performing life, Bart
The Bear fought Brad Pitt, Steven Seagal and
Sir Anthony Hopkins in Legends Of The Fall,
On Deadly Ground and The Edge, respectively
(all actors doubled by his trainer, Doug). He
squared off against Daryl Hannah in The Clan
Of The Cave Bear. And he memorably terrorised
John Candy and Dan Aykroyd as ‘The Bald-
Headed Bear’ in 1988 comedy The Great
Outdoors, complete with a bare-skin prosthetic
headpiece and, after an ‘amusing ’ incident
with an exploding lightbulb, a bare-skin
prosthetic butt-piece, too.
Bart was one of the last of his kind. Just as
John Wayne stood tall as one of Hollywood’s
last classic Western heroes while the genre
Above: Bart
The Bear takes
on Anthony
Hopkins and
a nasty-looking
spear in 1996’s
The Edge. They
also co-starred
in Legends Of
The Fall two
years earlier.
Right: Watch
your back! Bart
looms ominously
behind Ethan
Hawke in White
Fang (1991).declined, the Kodiak’s career climaxed as CGI
made its photo-real impact on the industry. If
The Revenanthad been made in the mid-’90s,
Bart would have been a no-brainer for the bear
role. Today, however, he would have faced fierce
competition from the sophisticated creations of
visual-effects artists. Despite being, as Annaud
can certainly attest, Mother Nature’s real deal,
and a versatile performer to boot.BART THE BEAR’S remarkable career began,
in a sense, before he was even born. During the
mid-’70s, Doug Seus and his wife Lynne resolved
to make a living out of training North American
animals for fi lm and television. Based on a three-
hectare plot in Heber City, Utah, the couple
consider themselves born naturalists. “I was
always trouncing around the deciduous forests
and waterways of my young life, catching frogsand butterfl ies,” says Doug, who was raised in
Pennsylvania, before the urge took him to go
west. Lynne, meanwhile, says she spent her
Nebraskan childhood “in the prairie catching
chipmunks”. She and the former special-forces
recruit met in April 1970. For their fi rst date,
Doug took Lynne to the herpetarium at Brigham
Young University to feed his rhino viper, a huge,
deadly venomous snake. So when they decided
to get a wolf instead of a dog, Lynne says, “It
made perfect sense to me.”
At the time, wilderness-themed
entertainments seemed to be all the rage. This
was the era of The Life And Times Of Grizzly
Adams, the beloved 1974 fi lm and NBC TV
series about the friendship between a hirsute
frontiersman (Dan Haggerty) and a bear (Bozo).
Having observed an animal trainer on a fi lm
set while working as a script supervisor, Lynne
realised there was no reason why she and Doug
couldn’t do it themselves, and they started