CHEETA
Tarzan’s ride-or-die ape was played by
Jiggs in Tarzan The Ape Man and
Tarzan And His Mate, trained by Tony
and Jacqueline Gentry. Following Jiggs’
death from pneumonia in 1938 aged
nine, the Gentrys trained other
chimps to play the character.LASSIE
Rudd Weatherwax (real name)
trained Rough Collie Pal to play
Lassie for 1943’s Lassie Come Home.
Pal’s big break came when the dog
earmarked to play Lassie was not
suffi ciently trained for the shots
MGM wanted of Lassie in a fl ood.
Pal, a canine Cliff Booth, stepped
in, and the rest is history.MISTER ED
Mister Ed, TV’s talking horse, was
played by the brilliantly named
Bamboo Harvester, a part-
Arabian American Saddlebred,
and trained by Les Hilton.
Initially, the horse talked via
a thread to his mouth, but
eventually learned how to
move his mouth when Hilton
touched his hoof, reacting when his
co-stars stopped talking.ORANGEY
Frank Inn trained male marmalade tabby
cat Orangey, best known for
playing opposite Audrey Hepburn
in Breakfast At Tiff any’s. Hepburn
said throwing the cat out into the
rain was the “most distasteful
thing she ever had to do on fi lm”.
Still, Orangey bagged his second
PATSY (Picture Animal Top Star
of the Year), the animal
equivalent of the Oscar.BABE
Karl Lewis Miller handled the dogs
in Cujo and Beethoven, and the hamsters
in The Nutty Professor. His masterpiece,
though, is Babe, training
970 animals for the fi lm,
including 48 Babe piglets
who kept outgrowing the
character over the three
years of fi lming. Miller also
cameos as the man who buys
three puppies. IAN FREERH O W T O
TRAIN
AN ICON
MORE ANIMAL MEGASTARS
(AND THEIR HANDLERS)T a M p n nThe Revenant, he says, and is adamant
he could have achieved that fi lm’s intense
bear-attack sequence using Bart II. But,
keen on long takes and close-ups of star
Leonardo DiCaprio, director Alejandro
G. Iñárritu took the digital-eff ects route.
When he fi nally saw the fi lm, Doug was
unconvinced by its digi-grizzly. “I had that
thing nailed,” he growls.
Of course, there are those who believe
there’s no reason for any animal to perform
for the entertainment of humans. “Well, isn’t
that sad?” sighs Doug. He wholeheartedly
believes Bart and his successors love what they
do (the American Humane association has
never had any issues with the Seus’ treatment
of their animals), and thinks something is lost
when an audience is presented with pixels
rather than the real thing. “You become removed
from the magic,” he says. “If you do it right, and
with passion and love, then why should it not
be able to happen?” It was not as if Bart even
presented a danger to the humans he worked
with. When we mention Annaud’s mishap to
Lynne, she dismisses it instantly. “Let me tell
you, that was no big deal. They like to make
out it was, but if it had been a big deal,
Jean-Jacques wouldn’t have been in the
lunch tent perfectly fi ne a half-hour later!”
How Bart himself really felt about his
stellar career, we’ll never know. But one
thing is certain — he was greatly loved, by
his surrogate parents, by his co-stars and
directors, and by the audiences to whom
he gave a vicarious, VFX-free taste of the
Alamy, Getty Images, The Vital Ground Foundation wild side.
Bart II inherited his predecessor’s taste for
applause. “At the end of the Game Of Thrones
shoot it sounded like the Super Bowl,” Lynne
says. “He loved it. He understands it and he eats
it up.”
Bart I’s greatest legacy is not his acting
work, the Seuses say, nor even Bart II. Around
the time they were making The Great Outdoors,
the couple decided to use their retirement
account to buy a 100-hectare parcel of land
in Montana and devote it to grizzlies. Since
then, much of what Bart earned (including
$1 million for The Edge alone, says Tamahori)
went towards buying more land to create
living space for North America’s increasingly
threatened bears, through Doug and Lynne’s
Vital Ground Foundation. “Without a doubt
that was Bart’s greatest role,” Lynne says.
One which Bart II has also continued as the
foundation’s foremost “spokesbear”.
However, his fi lm work is becoming less
regular. The most impactful bear scene of recent
times involved no bear at all, and doesn’t Doug
know it. He was approached by the producers of