In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his most famous role: the rather less colorfully named Cat, pet of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), who calls him a “poor slob without a name”. Orangey features heavily in the film’s climax, when Holly releases her pet into an alley as she prepares to leave town, only to have Paul (George Peppard) rush to retrieve him. It completes a running thread that Cat is a part of Holly’s wildness as well as her potential domestication. What better animal, of course, than one equally prone to draping himself over his makeshift mistress and making yowling leaps around her apartment?
