Bringing Up Baby (1938)
We’re heading all the way back to the late 1930s for this incredible movie cat! Bringing Up Baby was directed by Howard Hawks and was all about Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s characters finding themselves in some bizarre situations while attempting to look after a tame leopard named Baby.
Photo by FilmPublicityArchive/United Archive/Getty Images
Initially, the role of Baby was written as a panther, but no trained panthers could be found to appear in the film, so they had to change Baby to a leopard. A leopard named Nissa played the role, but she wasn’t totally tame, almost attacking Hepburn at one point off-camera.