⭐ Famous Cats
Famous Cats: Celebrity, Internet & Historical Felines
Celebrity companions, political trailblazers, internet legends, and feline heroes — cats who captured the world's attention.
Throughout history, certain cats have become genuinely famous — celebrity pets, political "mousers" with official titles, internet legends like Grumpy Cat, and feline heroes whose stories made headlines.
Use the filters below to browse famous cats by category. Each profile explains who the cat was, why it became famous, and a fun fact behind the fame.
👗
2011–present
Choupette
The most pampered cat in fashion
Choupette Lagerfeld is arguably the most famous cat in the fashion world. A blue-eyed Birman with an imperious expression, she was given to designer Karl Lagerfeld as a temporary houseguest in 2011 and never left. Lagerfeld, the longtime creative director of Chanel and Fendi, became completely devoted to her —…
⭐ Fun Fact
Choupette has her own published diary and has been the subject of a coffee-table book.
😾
2012–2019
Grumpy Cat
The internet's most recognisable frown
Grumpy Cat — real name Tardar Sauce — became one of the most recognisable animals on the internet after a photo of her perpetual scowl was posted to Reddit in September 2012 and went viral within hours. Her grumpy expression was the result of feline dwarfism and an underbite, not actual unhappiness; by all accounts…
⭐ Fun Fact
Grumpy Cat won the "Meme of the Year" award at the 2013 Webby Awards.
🏛
2011–present
Larry
Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office
Larry is a brown and white tabby who has served as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street since February 2011 — making him the longest-serving occupant of that address. He was adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and has outlasted five Prime Ministers: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak. His…
⭐ Fun Fact
Larry is technically a civil servant and remains at Downing Street regardless of which political party is in power.
⚓
1941–1955
Unsinkable Sam
The cat who survived three shipwrecks
Unsinkable Sam — originally named Oscar — is one of the most remarkable cats in naval history. He began his career as the ship's cat aboard the German battleship Bismarck. When the Bismarck was sunk by the Royal Navy on 27 May 1941 with the loss of over 2,000 men, Oscar was found floating on a board amid the wreckage,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Sam's portrait is inscribed with the words 'Able Seacat Oscar' — his original official naval designation.
🚀
1963
Félicette
The only cat ever to travel to space
On 18 October 1963, a black-and-white Parisian street cat named Félicette became the first — and only — cat to travel to space. France's space programme had trained 14 cats for the mission, selecting candidates based on temperament and weight. Félicette was chosen as the primary candidate, with electrodes implanted in…
⭐ Fun Fact
Félicette beat both dogs and humans to space as France's first animal astronaut.
📚
1988–2006
Dewey Readmore Books
The library cat who inspired a bestselling book
On a bitterly cold January morning in 1988, librarian Vicki Myron arrived at the Spencer Public Library in Iowa to find a tiny orange kitten in the book return slot, nearly frozen to death. The staff nursed him back to health, held a public naming contest, and he was officially named Dewey Readmore Books — after the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Dewey appeared in a Japanese educational textbook as an example of community spirit and the healing power of animals.
🧡
2007–2020
Bob the Street Cat
The ginger tom who saved a man's life
In 2007, James Bowen was a homeless busker and recovering heroin addict living in supported housing in London when he found an injured ginger tom in the hallway of his building. He spent his last money on veterinary treatment for the cat, named him Bob, and the two became inseparable. Bob began accompanying James on…
⭐ Fun Fact
Bob wore his signature handmade scarf in every public appearance and film scene — James tied it on him every morning.
🚂
2007–2015
Tama
The stationmaster cat who saved a railway line
Tama was a calico cat who lived near Kishi station on the Kishigawa line in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. In 2006, the privately run railway line was facing financial ruin and considering closure, unable to afford a human stationmaster. On a whim, the company appointed Tama — already a familiar presence at the station —…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tama's appointment as stationmaster is estimated to have saved the Kishigawa line from closure, which would have stranded thousands of commuters.
🇺🇸
1993–2001
Socks
America's most famous First Cat
Socks was a black-and-white tuxedo cat who lived in the White House throughout Bill Clinton's presidency, from 1993 to 2001, making him one of the most photographed cats in American history. He was discovered as a stray kitten by Chelsea Clinton, who brought him home, and he quickly became a media favourite —…
⭐ Fun Fact
Socks received approximately 75,000 letters and packages per week during peak Clinton-era popularity — more than some senators.
🌟
2012–2019
Lil Bub
The cat who used her fame to help other animals
Lil Bub was born in 2011 as the runt of a feral litter in rural Indiana, with an extraordinary array of genetic mutations: she had no teeth (causing her tongue to perpetually stick out), dwarfism that kept her permanently kitten-sized, extra toes on each paw (polydactyly), and osteopetrosis — an extremely rare bone…
⭐ Fun Fact
Lil Bub's genetic case was studied by researchers at the National Institutes of Health — she contributed to science as well as charity.
🗳
1997–2017
Stubbs
The honorary mayor who served for 20 years
Stubbs was an orange tabby cat who served as honorary mayor of Talkeetna, a small historic town in Alaska with a population of around 900 people, for almost two decades. His election came about when residents, unhappy with the human candidates on the 1997 ballot, organised a write-in campaign for the local cat — who…
⭐ Fun Fact
Stubbs once received a congratulatory letter from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, who apparently didn't check his species before sending it.
🎖
1962–present (lineage)
Jock (Churchill's Cat)
The cat who inspired a 60-year tradition
Winston Churchill was a lifelong, devoted cat lover — he kept cats throughout his life and reportedly held up Cabinet meetings to wait for his cats to leave the room. The most famous was a marmalade kitten given to him for his 88th birthday in 1962, which he named Jock. Churchill became so attached to Jock that he…
⭐ Fun Fact
Churchill reportedly insisted that Jock was present at the dining table during meals, and staff were instructed never to begin serving until the cat was settled.
🌍
2016–2020
Palmerston
The Chief Mouser who brawled with the Prime Minister's cat
Palmerston was a black-and-white cat adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in April 2016 who served as Chief Mouser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office — his full formal title was "Chief Mouser of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office," the diplomatic counterpart to Larry's role at Downing Street. He was named after…
⭐ Fun Fact
The Palmerston vs. Larry rivalry was so popular with the press that it generated more column inches than many actual diplomatic incidents during the same period.
🎖
1947–1949
Simon
The only cat ever awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry
Simon was a small black-and-white tom cat who was smuggled aboard HMS Amethyst as a kitten in 1948 by a seventeen-year-old sailor named George Hickinbottom, who hid him inside his cap. The ship's company adopted him as the official ship's cat, and he proved his worth as both a rat-catcher and a morale booster. Then,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Simon's Dickin Medal citation reads: 'For behaviour of the highest order. Throughout the Yangtze campaign he was an example to all.'
📦
2007–present
Maru
Japan's box-loving Scottish Fold — over 400 million views
Maru is a male Scottish Fold cat from Japan who became one of the earliest international viral cat stars. His owner — known online only as "mugumogu" — began posting videos in 2007 of Maru charging headfirst into cardboard boxes, sliding across floors, and squeezing himself into containers far too small for him. The…
⭐ Fun Fact
Maru once held the Guinness World Record for the most-viewed animal on YouTube, with videos that have collectively been watched over 400 million times.
⭐
2010–present
Nala Cat
The Siamese rescue with the most-followed Instagram of any cat
Nala Cat is a Siamese-tabby mix rescued from a Los Angeles animal shelter at five months old in 2010 by Varisiri "Pookie" Methachittiphan, then a college student. Pookie began posting photos of Nala to Instagram in 2012 — partly to encourage her followers to consider shelter adoption. Nala's enormous round eyes and…
⭐ Fun Fact
Nala Cat holds the Guinness World Record as the most-followed cat on Instagram, with over four million followers as of her 10th anniversary.
📚
1993 (in-universe) — present
Crookshanks
Hermione Granger's half-Kneazle companion
Crookshanks is a fictional ginger half-Kneazle cat owned by Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. He is introduced in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), bought by Hermione from the Magical Menagerie in Diagon Alley where, according to the shopkeeper, he had been waiting for the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Crookshanks was played in the films by a Persian named Crackerjack, who was one of several cats considered before producers selected him for the distinctive squashed-face look the books describe.
🛶
1914–1915
Mrs Chippy
The ship's cat aboard Shackleton's Endurance
Mrs Chippy was a tabby cat — actually male, despite the name — who sailed with Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the Endurance in 1914. The cat belonged to the ship's carpenter, Henry "Chippy" McNish, and was named for the way he followed the carpenter around like an attentive wife. By all…
⭐ Fun Fact
A life-sized bronze statue of Mrs Chippy was placed on Henry McNish's grave in Wellington, New Zealand in 2004 — almost 90 years after the events of the Endurance expedition.
🎬
1950–1968
Orangey
Hollywood's most decorated feline actor
Orangey was a marmalade tabby tomcat who became the most successful working cat in Hollywood history. Trained by Frank Inn — the famed animal trainer also responsible for Benji and Arnold Ziffel — Orangey appeared in dozens of films and television programmes between 1951 and 1962. He is best remembered as "Cat" in…
⭐ Fun Fact
Orangey is the only cat ever to win the Patsy Award — the animal equivalent of an Oscar — more than once, taking home the prize for both Rhubarb (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).
📖
1769–1784 (approx)
Hodge
Dr Johnson's 'very fine cat indeed'
Hodge was the much-loved cat of Samuel Johnson — the 18th-century lexicographer who compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Johnson's biographer James Boswell, who was reportedly nervous around cats, recorded the relationship with charming exasperation. Boswell wrote that Johnson was so…
⭐ Fun Fact
The Gough Square statue of Hodge depicts him sitting on a copy of Johnson's Dictionary — a literary in-joke that connects the cat directly to one of the great works of English scholarship.
⛵
1799–1804
Trim
The cat who circumnavigated Australia
Trim was a black tomcat born aboard HMS Reliance in 1799 during the voyage from England to Botany Bay. The kitten was adopted by navigator Matthew Flinders, who described him in such glowing terms — 'the best and most illustrious of his race' — that the resulting biographical sketch is now considered one of the finest…
⭐ Fun Fact
Flinders' biography of Trim is genuinely the earliest known full-length biographical work written about a specific cat — pre-dating the modern cat memoir genre by nearly two hundred years.
🎭
2007–2017
Henri, le Chat Noir
The internet's existentialist cat
Henri was a long-haired tuxedo cat from Seattle whose YouTube career began in 2007 as a film school project. His owner, filmmaker William Braden, produced a series of short black-and-white films in which Henri delivered French-language voiceovers full of dramatic existential despair — about his food bowl, his "white…
⭐ Fun Fact
Henri was the first internet cat to win a Webby Award — his acceptance video was delivered entirely in subtitled French, in keeping with the character.
🎩
2011–present
Hamilton the Hipster Cat
The white cat with the perfect grey moustache
Hamilton — full name Hamilton the Hipster Cat — became famous for one striking visual feature: a perfectly-shaped grey moustache sitting beneath his nose against an otherwise white face, giving him the precise look of a Victorian gentleman or a 21st-century coffee-shop philosopher. He was adopted by photographer JR…
⭐ Fun Fact
Hamilton's moustache is so naturally well-shaped that he has been mistakenly assumed to be photoshopped or face-painted in dozens of articles over the years — Bellanca regularly posts make-up-free studio photos to demonstrate it is real.
🔮
1996–present (in-universe)
Salem Saberhagen
The 500-year-old warlock cursed to live as a cat
Salem Saberhagen is the talking American Shorthair black cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch — the comic-strip character developed into a long-running US television comedy that ran from 1996 to 2003. In the show's mythology, Salem is not a cat at all but a 500-year-old warlock who attempted to take over the world and…
⭐ Fun Fact
Salem's voice was provided throughout the original 1996–2003 series by comedian Nick Bakay, who also voiced Norbert the beaver on The Angry Beavers — both characters share a similar fast-talking sarcasm.
🛋
died 2016
Tombili
The lounging street cat who got her own statue
Tombili was a chubby brown-and-white street cat who lived in the Ziverbey neighbourhood of Kadıköy, Istanbul, and became a beloved local fixture for her uncannily relaxed posture. A single photograph of her — reclining against the base of a step with one elbow propped on the kerb, gazing down the street like a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tombili's name is Turkish slang affectionately used for chubby, rotund animals — and her statue is one of very few in the world erected to honour an ordinary, un-owned street cat.
🔥
1995–2008
Scarlett
The mother cat who ran into a fire five times to save her kittens
On 30 March 1996, firefighters responding to a blaze in an abandoned garage in Brooklyn, New York, witnessed something they never forgot. A stray calico cat was carrying her four-week-old kittens, one by one, out of the burning building to safety across the street — running back into the flames five times until all…
⭐ Fun Fact
Scarlett's act of running back into the flames five times made her a global symbol of maternal love — and the animal welfare award created in her name continues to honour heroic animals decades later.
🎭
2009–present
Venus the Two-Faced Cat
The chimera cat with a perfectly split face
Venus is a tortoiseshell cat who became an internet sensation because of her extraordinary face: it is split perfectly down the middle, with one side solid black and the other side orange tabby, and she has one blue eye and one green eye. The striking symmetry makes her appear almost like two different cats fused…
⭐ Fun Fact
Venus may be a genetic chimera — an animal containing two distinct sets of DNA from two fused embryos — though her dramatic split face could also be an extraordinary coincidence of normal tortoiseshell genetics.
🦸
2008–present
Tara the Hero Cat
The cat who tackled a dog to save a child
On 13 May 2014, in Bakersfield, California, a four-year-old boy named Jeremy Triantafilo was riding his bicycle on the driveway of his family home when a neighbour's dog escaped, crept up behind him, and seized his leg in its jaws, dragging him from the bike. What happened next was captured on the family's home…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tara was honoured by the SPCA of Los Angeles with a special award normally reserved for dogs — and threw the ceremonial first puck at a professional ice hockey game held in her honour.
😼
2011–2014
Colonel Meow
The Guinness record-holder for the longest fur on a cat
Colonel Meow was a Himalayan–Persian cross famous for two things: an enormous, gravity-defying coat, and a permanently furious facial expression that made him look perpetually outraged at the state of the world. Rescued by the Himalayan and Persian Society in 2011 and adopted by Anne Marie Avey, he rose to internet…
⭐ Fun Fact
Colonel Meow holds the Guinness World Record for the longest fur on a cat — each hair averaging nearly 23 centimetres — and his fur was so long it had to be professionally groomed and occasionally trimmed to keep him comfortable.
🧦
2004–present
Sockington
The stray who became Twitter’s most famous cat
Sockington — "Socks" to his fans — is a black-and-white tuxedo cat who became one of the first true social-media animal celebrities. Found as a hungry stray at Boston's Back Bay train station in 2004, he was adopted by archivist and digital historian Jason Scott. In 2007, Scott began posting short, first-person…
⭐ Fun Fact
Sockington was one of the most-followed accounts on early Twitter, with over 1.5 million followers — all reading the daily thoughts of a cat rescued from a Boston train station.
🕌
2004–2020
Gli
The beloved guardian of Hagia Sophia
Gli — whose name means "union of love" in Turkish — was a green-eyed European Shorthair who lived inside Hagia Sophia, the thousand-year-old former cathedral and mosque in Istanbul, from her birth in 2004. For sixteen years she padded across the ancient marble floors and dozed beneath the great Byzantine arches,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Gli was so famous that the photograph of President Obama stroking her in 2009 became one of the most shared images of his visit to Turkey — and her own social-media accounts drew followers from around the world.
🥃
1963–1987
Towser
The greatest mouser the world has ever known
Towser was a long-haired tortoiseshell cat who spent her entire 24-year life as the resident mouser at the Glenturret Distillery near Crieff in Scotland — Scotland's oldest working distillery and the home of The Famous Grouse. Her job was to keep mice away from the barley used to make whisky, and she performed it with…
⭐ Fun Fact
Towser is officially recognised by Guinness World Records for catching an estimated 28,899 mice in her lifetime — and her paw print, pressed into the label, was once used to help authenticate bottles of Glenturret whisky.
🚌
1997–2010
Casper
The cat who caught the bus every day
Casper was a black-and-white cat from Plymouth, England, who became an international celebrity for his extraordinary daily routine: every morning he would stroll to the bus stop outside his home, wait in the queue, and board the No. 3 bus for a regular round-trip across the city. His owner, Susan Finden, only…
⭐ Fun Fact
Casper became such a well-known passenger that the bus company put up notices asking drivers to watch out for him — and after his death they installed a memorial plaque at his regular stop.
🏛️
1909–1929
Mike
The cat who guarded the British Museum
Mike was the official cat of the British Museum in London for two decades, and on his death in 1929 he was given something almost no cat receives: a published obituary, written by the celebrated Egyptologist Sir Ernest Wallis Budge. Mike arrived at the museum gates as a kitten around 1909, brought there by another…
⭐ Fun Fact
When Mike died, the eminent Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge wrote and printed a formal obituary for him, ensuring the museum cat was mourned in print like a distinguished scholar.
⛪
2008–2020
Doorkins Magnificat
The stray who became a cathedral’s resident cat
Doorkins Magnificat was a stray tabby who wandered into Southwark Cathedral in London around 2008 and simply decided to stay. The cathedral staff began feeding her, gave her a wonderfully ecclesiastical name — a pun on the Magnificat — and she became the cathedral's beloved resident cat for over a decade. Doorkins…
⭐ Fun Fact
Doorkins met Queen Elizabeth II in 2013 and, after her death in 2020, was honoured with a thanksgiving service inside Southwark Cathedral.
🐾
1930s–present
The Hemingway Cats
The six-toed cats of Hemingway’s home
At the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, around sixty cats roam the grounds — and roughly half of them have an extra toe or two. The story goes that a ship's captain gave the writer a white polydactyl ('many-toed') cat named Snow White, and the unusual trait has been passed down through dozens of…
⭐ Fun Fact
About half of the roughly sixty cats living at the Hemingway House are polydactyl — descendants of a six-toed cat the author was reportedly given by a ship’s captain.
🪶
1894
Tibbles
The cat at the centre of an extinction legend
Tibbles is remembered as one of the most consequential — and most misunderstood — cats in history. In 1894 she belonged to David Lyall, an assistant lighthouse keeper on tiny Stephens Island, off the coast of New Zealand. The cat began bringing him the bodies of a small, flightless bird found nowhere else on Earth.…
⭐ Fun Fact
The Stephens Island wren was scientifically described and declared extinct in almost the same breath — and Tibbles became history’s emblem of the danger cats pose to island birds.
🏴
1999–2014
Hamish McHamish
The free-roaming cat who belonged to a whole town
Hamish McHamish was a long-haired ginger cat who became the unofficial mascot of the ancient university town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland. Although he technically had an owner — a local woman named Marianne Baird, who took him in as a kitten — Hamish quickly decided that the entire town was his home.…
⭐ Fun Fact
St Andrews unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Hamish while he was still alive — and the local council formally gave permission for the unusual monument to a cat.
🧬
2001–2020
CC (CopyCat)
The first cloned cat in history
CC — short for "CopyCat" (and sometimes "Carbon Copy") — was the first cat, and one of the first pets of any kind, ever to be successfully cloned. She was born on 22 December 2001 at Texas A&M University, created from cells taken from a calico-and-white donor cat named Rainbow using the same somatic-cell nuclear…
⭐ Fun Fact
Although CC was a genetic clone of her donor cat, she did not look identical to her — proof that a calico cat's exact coat pattern is set by chance in the womb, not by its genes alone.
🎂
1967–2005
Creme Puff
The oldest cat that ever lived
Creme Puff holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest cat ever reliably documented, reaching the astonishing age of 38 years and 3 days. She was born on 3 August 1967 and lived in Austin, Texas, with her owner Jake Perry — who, remarkably, also owned the previous record-holder, a cat named Granpa Rexs Allen who…
⭐ Fun Fact
Creme Puff lived to 38 years and 3 days — more than double the average cat's lifespan — and her owner Jake Perry also owned the previous oldest-cat record holder.
🏛️
2016–present
Gladstone
The Treasury's chief mouser
Gladstone is the resident cat — and official mouser — of HM Treasury, the United Kingdom's economics and finance ministry in Whitehall. A black-and-white rescue cat, he was rehomed from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in 2016 to deal with a mouse problem in the historic government building, and quickly became a Whitehall…
⭐ Fun Fact
Gladstone is named after William Gladstone, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times — making him the perfectly-named cat to guard the Treasury.
🗳️
2009–2014
Hank the Cat
The cat who ran for the US Senate
Hank the Cat was a Maine Coon mix from Springfield, Virginia, who in 2012 mounted one of the most charming satirical political campaigns in American history — a write-in run for the United States Senate. Launched by his owners as a light-hearted stunt, "Hank for Senate" took on a life of its own: he had a campaign…
⭐ Fun Fact
Hank finished third in the 2012 Virginia US Senate race as a write-in candidate, and his campaign raised tens of thousands of dollars for animal charities.
🚉
1970–1983
Tiddles
The famously fat cat of Paddington Station
Tiddles was the celebrated resident cat of Paddington Station in London, where he lived from 1970 until 1983 in the ladies' lavatory, doted on by the attendants and a parade of admiring travellers. Arriving as a tiny stray kitten, Tiddles became such a beloved fixture of the great Victorian terminus that passengers…
⭐ Fun Fact
Spoiled with steak and lamb's tongues kept in his own refrigerator, Tiddles grew to around 30 pounds and was crowned "London Fat Cat Champion."
🎹
2004–2019
Nora the Piano Cat
The rescue cat who taught herself to play the piano
Nora was a grey tabby rescue cat from Philadelphia who became a worldwide sensation for a single, irresistibly endearing talent: she played the piano. Adopted in 2004 by piano teacher Betsy Alexander and her artist husband Burnell Yow!, Nora began climbing onto the piano bench at about a year old and pressing the keys…
⭐ Fun Fact
Nora's piano playing inspired a genuine orchestral work — the "CATcerto" — in which a full symphony orchestra performed live alongside video of her as the featured soloist.
🇺🇸
1990–2009
India "Willie"
The black cat of the George W. Bush White House
India — affectionately nicknamed "Willie" or "Kitty" — was the George W. Bush family's black shorthair cat and one of the First Pets during his two terms in the White House. Adopted in 1990 when daughter Barbara Bush was a child, India took her name from Texas Rangers baseball player Rubén "El Indio" Sierra, a…
⭐ Fun Fact
India was named after Texas Rangers baseball star Rubén "El Indio" Sierra — a nod to the Bush family's deep ties to the team, which George W. Bush co-owned before entering politics.
🐈⬛
2018–present
Willow
The farm-cat stray who became First Cat of the United States
Willow is the grey-and-white tabby belonging to President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and the first cat to live in the White House since the George W. Bush administration. Her path to the residence was charmingly humble: in 2020, while Jill Biden was giving a campaign speech at a farm in Pennsylvania, a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Willow earned her place in the family by gatecrashing a 2020 campaign speech — leaping onto the stage mid-event and stealing the show, which so charmed Jill Biden that the Bidens adopted her on the spot.
🏛️
1988–2006
Humphrey
The Downing Street mouser who served three Prime Ministers
Humphrey was a black-and-white stray who wandered into 10 Downing Street in 1989 and stayed to become one of Britain's most famous official cats, holding the title of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Named after the scheming civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby from the sitcom "Yes Minister", he served under Prime…
⭐ Fun Fact
When rumours spread that the incoming Blair family disliked him, Downing Street issued an official photo of Humphrey to prove he was alive and well — a press conference, in effect, for a cat.
⛪
c. 1936–1948
Faith
The church cat who sheltered her kitten through the Blitz
Faith was a tabby stray taken in by the rector of St Augustine's Church, near St Paul's Cathedral in London, in 1936. In September 1940, days before the Blitz began, the heavily settled cat carried her newly born kitten down from the upper floors of the rectory to a small recess in the basement, repeatedly returning…
⭐ Fun Fact
Because official animal-bravery medals were reserved for animals in military or civil-defence service, a special silver medal was struck just for Faith, honouring a humble church cat.
🏫
c. 1947–1968
Room 8
The stray who adopted a school and its pupils for 16 years
Room 8 was a grey tabby tomcat who wandered into a classroom — room number 8 — at Elysian Heights Elementary School in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and decided to stay. For about sixteen years he returned to the school each autumn when classes resumed, spending his summers roaming the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Room 8 received so much fan mail — said to run into the tens of thousands of letters over his life — that the school could barely keep up, and his Los Angeles Times obituary stretched to some 1,500 words.
🎨
c. 1872–1887
Foss
The Victorian poet's beloved, much-drawn cat
Foss was the cherished cat of Edward Lear, the English artist and poet famous for his nonsense verse, including "The Owl and the Pussycat". A tabby with a curiously short, stumpy tail — family legend held that a servant had docked it to stop him straying — Foss lived with Lear for some seventeen years and became a…
⭐ Fun Fact
When Edward Lear moved house, he had his new Italian villa built as an exact copy of the old one so that Foss would feel at home.
🚉
2011–present
Felix the Station Cat
The Huddersfield railway cat with her own job title
Felix is a black-and-white cat who has lived at Huddersfield railway station in West Yorkshire, England, since arriving as a kitten in 2011 to help with pest control. Over the years she became so beloved by commuters and staff that, in 2016, the rail operator officially promoted her to "Senior Pest Controller",…
⭐ Fun Fact
Felix holds the official staff title of "Senior Pest Controller" and was issued her own railway name badge and hi-vis jacket.
🎓
2015–present
Nitama
The successor to Japan's famous stationmaster cat
Nitama — whose name means "Tama II" — is the calico cat who succeeded the legendary Tama as stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Wakayama Electric Railway in Japan. The original Tama had been appointed stationmaster in 2007 and became a national phenomenon, drawing tourists from across the world and reviving the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Nitama's name literally means 'Tama Two', and she served a formal apprenticeship as the original stationmaster cat's understudy before taking over the post.
🐟
d. 1747
Selima
The cat immortalised by one of the most famous poems in the English language
Selima was the beloved tabby cat of the 18th-century writer and politician Horace Walpole, and she owes her fame to a single, fatal moment of curiosity. According to the story, Selima was peering into a large ornamental tub of goldfish at Walpole's home when she overbalanced, tumbled in, and drowned. Walpole's friend,…
⭐ Fun Fact
The actual goldfish bowl Selima fell into was kept on display at Walpole's villa, Strawberry Hill, mounted on a pedestal inscribed with the first stanza of Gray's poem.
📜
c. 9th century
Pangur Bán
A monk's white cat, the subject of a beloved 1,200-year-old poem
Pangur Bán — the name means "white fuller" in Old Irish — is the white cat of an unnamed 9th-century Irish monk, and the subject of one of the oldest and most charming pet poems in the world. Written in the margins of a manuscript (the Reichenau Primer) by a monk far from home, the poem affectionately compares the…
⭐ Fun Fact
The poem was scribbled in the margin of a manuscript by a homesick monk — making Pangur Bán possibly the most famous example of a cat 'doodled' into the edge of someone's work.
🎩
1998–2002
Catmando
The cat who was joint leader of a British political party
Catmando holds one of the most unusual political distinctions of any animal: he was, briefly, the joint leader of a registered British political party. When the founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Screaming Lord Sutch, died in 1999, the party's leadership passed jointly to Alan 'Howling Laud' Hope and…
⭐ Fun Fact
When Catmando died in 2002, the Monster Raving Loony Party issued tributes and the surviving co-leader carried on alone — making Catmando one of very few cats ever to hold a formal party leadership title.
🎹
1980s footage, viral from 2007
Keyboard Cat (Fatso)
The cat who "plays you off" the internet
Keyboard Cat is one of the foundational memes of the early internet — and, remarkably, the footage that made him famous was shot years before YouTube even existed. The original star was a female cat named Fatso, owned by artist Charlie Schmidt, who filmed her in 1984 dressed in a little blue shirt with her paws moved…
⭐ Fun Fact
The Keyboard Cat in the original 1984 video was actually a female cat named Fatso — and she had been dead for twenty years by the time her clip went viral.
🔬
1975 (published)
F. D. C. Willard
The cat who co-authored a physics paper
F. D. C. Willard is the pen name of a Siamese cat who became, improbably, a published physicist. In 1975, American physicist Jack H. Hetherington wrote a paper on low-temperature physics for the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. A colleague pointed out that Hetherington had used the royal "we" throughout,…
⭐ Fun Fact
The name "F. D. C. Willard" stood for "Felis Domesticus, Chester, Willard" — and Chester the cat was later listed as the sole author of a second physics paper, written in French.
🔔
Legend, c. 14th–15th century
Dick Whittington's Cat
The cat who made a Lord Mayor of London
Few cats have shaped a legend as enduring as the one tied to Richard Whittington, a real medieval English merchant who served four times as Lord Mayor of London and died in 1423. The historical Whittington was wealthy and generous, funding hospitals, libraries and almshouses — but folklore gave him a far humbler…
⭐ Fun Fact
A monument on Highgate Hill in London, crowned with a sculpture of the cat, marks the legendary spot where Dick Whittington heard the Bow Bells call him back to become Lord Mayor.
🏛️
1973–1988
Wilberforce
The Downing Street cat who served four Prime Ministers
Long before Larry the Cat became a social-media celebrity, Wilberforce held the post of resident mouser at 10 Downing Street and served under four Prime Ministers — Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. Adopted from the RSPCA's animal shelter in 1973, Wilberforce was a working cat brought…
⭐ Fun Fact
Margaret Thatcher reportedly brought Wilberforce a tin of sardines back from a visit to Moscow — making him perhaps the only cat to receive a souvenir from a Cold War summit.
💰
Inherited fortune 2011
Tommaso
The stray who inherited a multi-million-euro fortune
Tommaso began life as a black stray wandering the streets of Rome, and ended it as one of the wealthiest cats in the world. He was taken in by Maria Assunta, the childless widow of a wealthy Italian property developer, who lavished affection on him in her final years. When she died in 2011 at the age of 94, she left…
⭐ Fun Fact
Italian law bars a cat from being a legal heir, so Maria Assunta's roughly €10 million fortune was left in trust to a caretaker on Tommaso's behalf.
🦍
1984
All Ball
The kitten a gorilla chose, named and grieved for
All Ball was a grey-and-white tailless kitten who became one of the most quietly remarkable animals of the twentieth century — not for anything she did, but for who loved her. Koko, the western lowland gorilla famous for having been taught a form of sign language, had repeatedly asked her caregivers for a cat. For her…
⭐ Fun Fact
Koko chose All Ball herself from a litter and gave him his name in sign language — and when the kitten died, her keepers recorded her signing what they read as expressions of grief.
🦿
2009–onwards
Oscar the Bionic Cat
The cat who walked again on two bionic legs
Oscar was an ordinary black cat from Jersey in the Channel Islands until a single accident made him a landmark in veterinary medicine. In October 2009, while dozing in a field, he was struck by a combine harvester and lost both of his hind paws. Faced with injuries that would once have meant euthanasia, his owners…
⭐ Fun Fact
Oscar's bionic legs were anchored using a technique inspired by deer antlers, in which skin seals tightly around metal implanted directly into the bone — making him the first cat ever fitted with two such prosthetic limbs.
🖋️
1840s
Catarina
The tortoiseshell who kept a dying woman warm and inspired a horror classic
Catarina was the beloved tortoiseshell cat of the writer Edgar Allan Poe and his young wife Virginia during the impoverished final years of their life together in the 1840s. By several accounts she was a constant household companion, devoted to Virginia in particular. In the bitter cold of the Poes' poverty, with the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Too poor to heat their home, the Poes relied on Catarina to lie on the ailing Virginia's chest for warmth — and the same cat is thought to have inspired Poe's chilling 1843 tale 'The Black Cat.'
🏰
c. 1601–1603
Trixie
The cat who climbed down a chimney to comfort a prisoner
Trixie is the black-and-white cat immortalised beside Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton — Shakespeare's patron — in a famous portrait painted during his imprisonment in the Tower of London. Southampton was locked up in 1601 for his part in the Earl of Essex's failed rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Legend holds that Trixie found her imprisoned master by climbing down the chimney of his cell in the Tower of London — and she was painted at his side in his 1603 captivity portrait.
⚡
1860s
Mačak
The cat whose spark lit Tesla's lifelong obsession with electricity
Mačak (Serbian for 'tomcat') was the beloved black cat of the young Nikola Tesla, who would grow up to become one of history's greatest inventors and the pioneer of alternating-current electricity. In a letter written late in his life, Tesla described Mačak as 'the finest of all cats in the world' and recalled a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Nikola Tesla traced his lifelong fascination with electricity to a childhood night when he stroked his cat Mačak and watched sparks of static leap from its fur.
🧺
2002–2020
Shironeko
The 'world's most zen cat' who napped his way to fame
Shironeko — Japanese for 'white cat' — was a placid, fold-eared cat from Japan who became a global internet phenomenon thanks to his extraordinary air of calm. Known to English-speaking fans as 'Basket Cat' or 'the Zen Master', he was famous for sitting serenely in wicker baskets while objects were carefully balanced…
⭐ Fun Fact
Nicknamed 'Basket Cat', Shironeko was so famously unflappable that fans balanced fruit and toys on his head while he sat in a basket, eyes half-closed in perfect contentment.
🍽️
1968–present (as a brand mascot)
Morris the Cat
The finicky orange tabby who became a cat-food icon
Morris the Cat is one of the most famous advertising animals in American history — a big, laid-back orange tabby who became the long-running mascot of 9Lives cat food. The original Morris was discovered in 1968 at an animal shelter in Lombard, Illinois, by animal trainer Bob Martwick, who spotted his striking looks…
⭐ Fun Fact
Every cat cast as Morris has been adopted from an animal shelter — turning the world's most finicky fictional cat into a real-life champion of pet adoption.
💰
died 1988
Blackie
The richest cat in history, by world record
Blackie holds a Guinness World Record that has never been beaten: the wealthiest cat ever known. He belonged to Ben Rea, a reclusive British antiques dealer and property magnate who shared his large house with Blackie and a sizeable colony of other cats. Rea was famously private and shunned his human family, lavishing…
⭐ Fun Fact
Blackie inherited around £7 million and holds the Guinness World Record as the wealthiest cat in history — a title still unbeaten today.
🥄
1960s–1976
Arthur
The British TV cat who ate with his paw
Arthur was a white British shorthair who became one of the United Kingdom's best-known television cats in the 1960s and 1970s as the star of adverts for Kattomeat (later Katkins) cat food. His signature trick made him famous: rather than eating from a bowl in the ordinary way, Arthur would scoop the food out with his…
⭐ Fun Fact
Arthur's trademark was eating with his paw rather than from the bowl — a habit so iconic that the cat-food brand was eventually renamed 'Arthur's' after him.
🐾
c. 2009–present
Mittens
The wandering cat awarded the key to a capital city
Mittens is a Turkish Angora cat who became so beloved in Wellington, New Zealand, that the city formally awarded him the Key to the City in 2020 — an honour usually reserved for visiting dignitaries and heroes. A free-roaming wanderer, Mittens spent his days strolling through the central city, slipping into shops,…
⭐ Fun Fact
In 2020 the city of Wellington awarded Mittens the Key to the City — one of very few cats in the world to receive a civic honour normally reserved for visiting dignitaries.
🛹
2011–present
Didga
The skateboarding cat with a world record for tricks
Didga — short for Didgeridoo — is an Australian rescue cat who became famous as one of the most accomplished trick-performing cats in the world. Adopted as a kitten from a shelter on the Gold Coast by professional animal trainer Robert Dollwet, she was trained using positive-reinforcement, clicker-based methods more…
⭐ Fun Fact
Didga holds a Guinness World Record for the most tricks performed by a cat in one minute — twenty of them — and is famous for actually skateboarding.
🤵
2007–2013
Tuxedo Stan
The tuxedo cat who ran for mayor to help strays
Tuxedo Stan was a black-and-white cat from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who in 2012 ran a genuine — if tongue-in-cheek — campaign for mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality. His owners, veterinarian Hugh Chisholm and his wife Kathy, launched the campaign under a "Tuxedo Party" banner not in the expectation of winning,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tuxedo Stan's 2012 'Tuxedo Party' run for mayor of Halifax was never meant to win — it was a campaign to fund spay-neuter services and shelter for the city's homeless cats, and it raised thousands of dollars doing exactly that.
📸
2014–present
Smoothie the Cat
"The world's most photogenic cat"
Smoothie is a long-haired golden British Longhair from the Netherlands who rose to internet fame in the mid-2010s and earned the affectionate nickname "the world's most photogenic cat". With her luxuriant golden coat, perfectly symmetrical markings, and arrestingly large round eyes, she seems almost designed for the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Smoothie is so consistently camera-ready that fans joke she knows how to pose — her symmetrical golden markings and huge round eyes earned her the title of the internet's most photogenic cat.
🐼
2011–2017
Snoopy
The flat-faced Exotic Shorthair who charmed China
Snoopy — often written "Snoopybabe" after his social-media handle — was an Exotic Shorthair from Chengdu, China, who became one of Asia's first great feline internet stars in the early 2010s. With the squashed, round face and enormous wide-set eyes typical of the breed, he looked uncannily like a living plush toy, and…
⭐ Fun Fact
Snoopy was one of the first cats to become a viral sensation on China's Weibo before crossing over to Western social media — an early bridge between the East and West cat-internet.
🚉
2010–2018
Bob the Railway Cat
The station cat of Kilburn who lifted commuters' spirits
Bob was a much-loved black-and-white cat who adopted St Augustine's Church next to Kilburn High Road station in north-west London and became a familiar, comforting presence to commuters and parishioners through the 2010s. Station and neighbourhood cats occupy a special place in British affection — from Tama the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Community and station cats like Bob have a long British pedigree — the Victorian post office and railway networks even kept official "establishment cats" on the payroll to control mice.
🏛️
2012–2014
Freya
The Downing Street tabby who roamed Whitehall
Freya was a brown tabby who lived at 11 Downing Street during George Osborne's time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, sharing the government's most famous address with Larry, the Chief Mouser at Number 10. Originally the Osborne family pet, Freya had gone missing for a period before being reunited with the family and…
⭐ Fun Fact
Freya and Larry were often portrayed by the press as feuding rivals, giving Westminster its own long-running "cat war" storyline.
🏨
1930s–present (lineage)
Matilda
The reigning house cat of New York's Algonquin Hotel
Matilda is the name borne by the resident cat of the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan — the latest in a line of house cats that stretches back to the 1920s, when, as legend has it, a stray wandered in and was adopted by the staff. Ever since, the famous literary hotel (home of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table)…
⭐ Fun Fact
By long-standing Algonquin tradition every female house cat is named Matilda and every male Hamlet — and the reigning cat has even had birthday parties thrown in the hotel ballroom.
🎥
2011–present
Cole and Marmalade
The rescue duo who became YouTube ambassadors for adoption
Cole and Marmalade are two rescue cats — a sleek black cat and a ginger tabby — who became internet stars through a hugely popular YouTube channel run by their owner Chris Poole. Cole was adopted from a shelter as a black kitten, a colour that is statistically the least likely to be rehomed because of lingering…
⭐ Fun Fact
Cole is a black cat, the colour least likely to be adopted from shelters — his fame has been used deliberately to challenge the superstition and boost black-cat adoptions.
🎬
2019–present
OwlKitty
The black cat digitally edited into every blockbuster movie
OwlKitty is a black cat named Lizzy who lives in Portland, Oregon, and has become one of the internet's most inventive feline stars. Her owner, French video artist Tibo Charroppin, painstakingly green-screens and rotoscopes Lizzy into iconic scenes from famous films and TV shows — so she can be seen menacing the T-rex…
⭐ Fun Fact
Lizzy is filmed doing perfectly normal cat things against a green screen — the movie magic that drops her into Jurassic Park or The Shining is all added afterwards, frame by frame.
☁️
2017–present
Bone Bone
Thailand's enormous, impossibly fluffy internet sensation
Bone Bone is a giant, extraordinarily fluffy cat from Thailand who became an internet phenomenon after photographs of his cloud-like coat began circulating in 2017. Though he looks almost impossibly large, much of his bulk is his dense, voluminous fur, which makes him appear roughly the size of a small dog — a look so…
⭐ Fun Fact
Bone Bone is far less heavy than he looks — a huge amount of his "giant" size is simply his thick, cloud-like coat rather than actual body mass.
🧡
2021–present
Jorts
The orange office cat who became the accidental mascot of the labour movement
Jorts is an orange tabby office cat who shot to fame in late 2021 through a viral thread on Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" forum. In it, an anonymous coworker recounted an escalating workplace dispute over Jorts and a second office cat, a clever tortoiseshell named Jean. A colleague had decided that Jorts — who could not…
⭐ Fun Fact
The whole saga kicked off because a coworker kept applying margarine to Jorts to "help" him groom — advice a vet would firmly warn against, and which only left one very greasy, very confused orange cat.
🎤
1986–1990s
Delilah
Freddie Mercury's beloved cat, immortalised in a Queen song
Delilah was a tortoiseshell-and-white cat and the undisputed favourite among the many cats Freddie Mercury kept at his London home, Garden Lodge. Mercury was devoted to his cats — over the years the household included Tom, Jerry, Oscar, Tiffany, Goliath, Lily, Miko, Romeo, Dorothy and others — and he treated them as…
⭐ Fun Fact
The Queen song "Delilah" on the 1991 album Innuendo is written entirely about this one cat — Freddie even uses a talk box to imitate a meow in it.
📏
1990–1997
Tinker Toy
The smallest cat ever recorded, at just 7 cm tall
Tinker Toy holds the Guinness World Record as the smallest domestic cat ever recorded. A male blue-point Himalayan-Persian, he measured a mere 7 cm (2.75 in) tall and 19 cm (7.5 in) long when fully grown, and weighed only about 1 lb 8 oz (roughly 680 g) — a fraction of the size expected of his breed. Born on Christmas…
⭐ Fun Fact
At 7 cm tall and 19 cm long, Tinker Toy was smaller than many TV remote controls — and his record for the smallest cat ever has never been broken.
🩶
2010–present
Pusheen
The chubby grey tabby who became the internet's favourite cartoon cat
Pusheen is a plump, grey-striped cartoon cat who has grown from a webcomic sidekick into one of the most recognisable animated cats on the internet. She was created in 2010 by Claire Belton and Andrew Duff for their site Everyday Cute, and was named after the Irish word "puisín", meaning kitten. With her round body,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Pusheen's name comes from the Irish word "puisín", meaning "kitten" — and although she is a cartoon, she was inspired by her creators' own real-life cats.
🤨
2012–present
Sam Has Eyebrows
The black-and-white cat whose markings gave him permanent worried eyebrows
Sam is a black-and-white cat who became an internet sensation for one delightfully simple reason: the black patches above his eyes look exactly like a pair of raised, worried eyebrows. The markings give his little white face a permanently anxious, quizzical or faintly disapproving expression, as though he is forever…
⭐ Fun Fact
Sam has no unusual expressions at all — his permanently "worried" look is created entirely by two black patches of fur sitting just above his eyes on an otherwise white face.
🏪
A New York institution
Bodega Cats
The beloved shop cats who rule New York's corner stores
A "bodega cat" is not one famous cat but a whole beloved institution: the resident felines who live and work in the small corner stores — bodegas — that dot New York City. Curled up on stacks of newspapers, perched between the chip bags, or sprawled across the deli counter as if they own the place, these cats are a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Bodega cats are so cherished in New York that when the city has threatened stores with fines for keeping them, residents have rallied with petitions and even proposed laws to protect them.
🐾
c. 1900s
Slippers
The six-toed cat who stopped a White House dinner
Slippers was a grey polydactyl cat — born with extra toes on his paws, the trait that gave him his name — who lived in the White House during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s. The Roosevelt family were famous animal lovers, keeping a menagerie of pets, and Slippers was among the most indulged,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Slippers was a polydactyl, or "many-toed", cat — the same lucky extra-toed trait now associated with Ernest Hemingway's famous Key West cats.
🎩
1860s
Tabby and Dixie
The first cats to live in the White House
Tabby and Dixie were the two cats of President Abraham Lincoln, and they hold the distinction of being the first cats known to have lived in the White House. Lincoln was a devoted cat lover in an age when the animals were kept mostly as working mousers rather than cherished companions, and his affection for them was…
⭐ Fun Fact
Abraham Lincoln reportedly said his cat "Dixie is smarter than my whole cabinet" — and once fed Tabby with a gold fork at a formal White House dinner.
👁️
2015–present
Coby the Cat
The blue-eyed British Shorthair who mesmerised Instagram
Coby is a white British Shorthair whose extraordinarily vivid, ice-blue eyes — rimmed with dark markings that look uncannily like carefully applied eyeliner — turned him into one of Instagram's most recognisable cats. Photographed against clean, minimalist backdrops that let his striking face take centre stage, he…
⭐ Fun Fact
Coby's dramatic "eyeliner" is entirely natural — the dark markings that ring his brilliant blue eyes are simply his own coat colouring, not makeup or editing.
🌈
2011–present
Nyan Cat
The pop-tart cat who flew across the internet on a rainbow
Nyan Cat is one of the internet's most enduring memes: a pixel-art grey cat with the body of a frosted, sprinkled pop-tart, trailing a shimmering rainbow as it loops endlessly across a starry sky. It was created in April 2011 by American artist Christopher Torres, who posted the animation on his website under the name…
⭐ Fun Fact
The name "Nyan" comes from the Japanese sound for a cat's meow — so Nyan Cat is, quite literally, "Meow Cat".
✏️
2008–present
Simon's Cat
The hand-drawn cat whose antics anyone with a cat instantly recognises
Simon's Cat is a wildly popular series of simple black-and-white animated films following the misadventures of a mischievous, permanently hungry house cat and his long-suffering owner. Created by British animator Simon Tofield, the cartoon debuted on YouTube in 2008 with a short called "Cat Man Do", in which the cat…
⭐ Fun Fact
The very first Simon's Cat film, "Cat Man Do", was based on Simon Tofield's real experience of being woken by his own hungry cats — and it has since been watched tens of millions of times.
🐈
early–mid 20th century
Sizi
The cat a Nobel laureate would not disturb, even to work
Sizi was the cat of Albert Schweitzer — the celebrated Alsatian physician, theologian, organist and philosopher who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his humanitarian work and his ethic of "reverence for life". At the hospital he founded in Lambaréné, in what is now Gabon, Schweitzer surrounded himself with…
⭐ Fun Fact
Schweitzer once observed that there are two means of refuge from the miseries of life — music and cats — and his devotion to Sizi showed he meant it.
🍝
1978–present
Garfield
The lasagna-loving, Monday-hating tabby who became the world's most syndicated comic strip
Garfield padded into the world on 19 June 1978, when cartoonist Jim Davis launched his comic strip in 41 American newspapers. A fat, cynical orange tabby with a bottomless appetite for lasagna, a deep contempt for Mondays and diets, and a habit of tormenting the hapless dog Odie, Garfield was an instant hit. Within a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Garfield is officially the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world — and Jim Davis has joked that Garfield has no real reason to hate Mondays, since as a house cat who does not work, every day of his week is exactly the same.
🐱
2004–present
Puss in Boots
The sword-fighting, boot-wearing swashbuckler with the most weaponised big eyes in cinema
Although the fairy-tale figure of Puss in Boots dates back to a 17th-century story by Charles Perrault, the cat most of the world pictures today is the swashbuckling ginger tom voiced by Antonio Banderas, who first strutted onto screens in DreamWorks' Shrek 2 in 2004. Introduced as a fearsome feline assassin hired to…
⭐ Fun Fact
Puss's famous wide-eyed pleading look was inspired by the way real cats gaze up to beg from their owners — and the animators exaggerated it so successfully that the expression became one of the most imitated cat faces in the world.
⚽
c. 2015–present
Achilles
The deaf white cat of the Hermitage who moonlighted as Russia's football-predicting oracle
Achilles is one of the dozens of cats employed as working mousers in the vast cellars of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg — a feline tradition dating back to the 18th century, when Empress Elizabeth first brought cats in to protect the imperial art collection from rodents. A striking white cat with blue…
⭐ Fun Fact
Achilles' keepers insisted his deafness was a professional advantage — because he cannot hear the crowds or the commentators, they said, his World Cup predictions were gloriously free of bias.
🏛️
2007–2009
Sybil
The short-lived Downing Street mouser who briefly held the post before Larry made it famous
Sybil was a black-and-white cat who, in 2007, became one of the more unusual residents of Downing Street. She belonged to Alistair Darling, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and moved with the family into Number 11 — the Chancellor's official residence, next door to the Prime Minister at Number 10. The press quickly…
⭐ Fun Fact
Sybil was named after Sybil Fawlty from the classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers — and, rather like her fictional namesake, she never quite took to the chaos around her, retiring from Downing Street after only a few months.
🐈⬛
1927–present
Kaspar
The Savoy Hotel's Art-Deco black cat, seated as the fourteenth guest to banish the bad luck of thirteen
Kaspar is not a living cat but a sleek, Art-Deco sculpture of a black cat — and one of the most charming characters in London hospitality. He was carved in 1927 by the architect and designer Basil Ionides, and for nearly a century he has had a very particular job at the Savoy Hotel: to break the superstition that a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Kaspar is served the full menu when he sits in as the fourteenth guest — a napkin is tied around his neck and every course is placed before him, glass of wine included, just as it would be for a human diner.
🏏
1952–1964
Peter
The Lord's Cricket Ground cat whose death earned a rare obituary in Wisden
Peter was a black cat who spent his life at Lord's Cricket Ground, the London home of cricket, where he became a familiar and much-loved fixture around the pavilion and grounds. For a dozen years, from 1952 until his death in 1964, he prowled the outfield edges, dozed in the pavilion and kept the ground's rodent…
⭐ Fun Fact
Peter is one of the very few animals ever given an obituary in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack — the 'Bible of Cricket' — which solemnly recorded the passing of 'Peter, a cat, of great character' in 1964.
🎖️
1942–1943
Mourka
The Stalingrad cat said to have carried messages about enemy gun positions across the ruined city
Mourka is remembered as one of the more extraordinary animal stories to come out of the Second World War. During the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43 — among the bloodiest engagements in human history — this cat is said to have served as an unlikely message-carrier for Soviet soldiers fighting street to street through…
⭐ Fun Fact
Mourka's wartime 'commute' was reported in the British press during the war, and he was even described, half in admiration, as a cat who did his bit for the Red Army — carrying intelligence no human runner could safely deliver.
🛰️
2023
Taters
The ginger tabby whose video was beamed 19 million miles across deep space by laser
Taters is an orange tabby who, in December 2023, became the unlikely star of a genuine milestone in space communication. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the cat as the subject of the first-ever high-definition video streamed from deep space by laser, as part of its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC)…
⭐ Fun Fact
The laser signal carrying Taters's video travelled about 19 million miles yet arrived faster than many people's home internet — a deliberate demonstration of how optical communication could one day stream live video back from Mars.
📏
2005–2013
Stewie
The gentle Maine Coon who held the Guinness record for the longest domestic cat
Mymains Stewart Gilligan — known to everyone simply as Stewie — was a grey tabby Maine Coon from Reno, Nevada, who entered the record books as the longest domestic cat ever measured. In 2010 Guinness World Records certified him at 48.5 inches (123 cm) from the tip of his nose to the end of his outstretched tail, a…
⭐ Fun Fact
At 123 cm (over 4 feet) long, Stewie was roughly the length of a golden retriever — yet his owners said his defining quality was not his size but his exceptionally gentle, people-loving nature.
🔊
recorded 2015
Merlin
The rescue cat whose purr was officially the loudest ever recorded
Merlin, a black-and-white rescue cat from Torquay in Devon, England, earned a place in Guinness World Records for the loudest purr by a domestic cat. In 2015 his purr was officially measured at 67.8 decibels — roughly as loud as a running shower, an air conditioner, or the background hum of a busy office, and around…
⭐ Fun Fact
At 67.8 decibels Merlin's purr was about as loud as a running shower — some three times the volume of an ordinary cat's purr, and loud enough, his owner said, to drown out the television.
😼
1945–present
Sylvester the Cat
The lisping, perpetually-thwarted Looney Tunes tuxedo cat
Sylvester the Cat — full name Sylvester J. Pussycat — is the black-and-white tuxedo cat of Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes, who first fully appeared in the 1945 short 'Life with Feathers'. With his sloppy, spraying lisp — most famously the exasperated cry of 'Sufferin' succotash!' — and his boundless, doomed determination,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Sylvester's catchphrase 'Sufferin' succotash!' is a minced oath — a family-friendly stand-in for 'suffering saviour' — and succotash, a dish of corn and beans, has nothing to do with it beyond the pleasing alliteration.
🎩
1919–present
Felix the Cat
The silent-era cat who helped invent the cartoon star
Felix the Cat is one of the very first animated characters to achieve real stardom, dating back to the silent-film era around 1919. Produced by Pat Sullivan's studio and animated largely by Otto Messmer, the mischievous black cat with his wide eyes and endless bag of tricks became a global sensation in the 1920s, at a…
⭐ Fun Fact
A papier-mâché Felix the Cat figurine was used as the subject in RCA's experimental television broadcasts around 1928, making him one of the first images ever transmitted by TV.
🐭
1940–present
Tom (of Tom and Jerry)
The cat in cartoon history’s greatest chase
Tom is the grey-blue house cat at the centre of 'Tom and Jerry', the theatrical cartoon series created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for MGM, first appearing in the 1940 short 'Puss Gets the Boot'. Across dozens of shorts, Tom's endless, doomed pursuit of the quick-witted mouse Jerry became one of the most…
⭐ Fun Fact
'Tom and Jerry' won seven Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, tying it with Disney's Silly Symphonies for the most Oscars of any animated series.
🧵
1974
Bagpuss
The saggy old cloth cat Britain never forgot
Bagpuss is a 'saggy, old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams' — the star of a gentle British children's television series made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate's Smallfilms company and first broadcast by the BBC in 1974. Remarkably, only thirteen episodes were ever produced, yet the pink-and-cream…
⭐ Fun Fact
Only thirteen episodes of 'Bagpuss' were ever made, yet in 1999 it topped a BBC poll as the nation's favourite children's programme — and his famous pink stripes were the result of a dyeing mistake.
😸
1865
The Cheshire Cat
The grinning cat who could vanish, tail-first
The Cheshire Cat is one of the most famous fictional cats ever written, first appearing in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. A large tabby with a permanent, unnervingly wide grin, the cat perches in a tree and speaks to Alice in riddles and paradoxes, dispensing cryptic wisdom about a…
⭐ Fun Fact
The phrase 'grinning like a Cheshire cat' predates the book — Lewis Carroll borrowed an existing English saying and gave it the unforgettable twist of a cat that fades away until only its smile remains.
😾
1959
Azrael
The long-suffering ginger cat of the Smurfs' villain
Azrael is the ginger cat belonging to Gargamel, the bumbling wizard who forever schemes to catch the Smurfs. Created by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo, Azrael first appeared in the Smurfs comics and became known worldwide through the hugely popular 1980s animated television series.
Where Gargamel is greedy and inept,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Azrael is named after the angel of death — a grand title for a cat whose schemes to eat the Smurfs almost never work out.
🚀
1979
Jonesy
The ship's cat who survived the film's monster
Jonesy — sometimes written 'Jones' — is the ginger tomcat aboard the commercial spaceship Nostromo in Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction classic 'Alien'. Kept as the ship's cat, Jonesy spends the film wandering the vessel's shadowy corridors, and more than once his sudden appearances are used to ratchet up the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Jonesy is one of just two survivors of the original 'Alien' — the cat makes it to the end of the film alongside Ripley, who tucks him safely into a hypersleep pod.
🐈⬛
1940
Figaro
Geppetto's tuxedo kitten, and Walt Disney's favourite
Figaro is the small black-and-white tuxedo kitten who belongs to the woodcarver Geppetto in Disney's 1940 animated film 'Pinocchio'. Playful, sulky, and endlessly expressive, Figaro shares Geppetto's home with the goldfish Cleo and provides much of the film's warmth and comedy as the household waits and hopes for…
⭐ Fun Fact
Figaro was reportedly Walt Disney's favourite character — Disney liked the kitten so much that he had him written into other cartoons and later made him Minnie Mouse's pet cat.
🕯️
2005–2022
Oscar the Therapy Cat
The nursing-home cat who seemed to sense the end
Oscar was a tortoiseshell-and-white cat adopted as a kitten by a nursing and rehabilitation centre in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived on the advanced-dementia unit. Staff there came to notice something remarkable: Oscar would repeatedly settle beside patients in their final hours, curling up with people who…
⭐ Fun Fact
Oscar's story appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine — an unusually prestigious venue for a cat, and one that sparked worldwide debate about what he was really sensing.
🎩
1961–1962 (original series)
Top Cat
The fast-talking leader of a Manhattan alley-cat gang
Top Cat — 'T.C.' to his close friends — is the smooth-talking, scheming leader of a gang of alley cats in the Hanna-Barbera animated series that first aired in 1961. Set in a New York City alleyway in Manhattan, the show follows T.C. and his crew — Benny the Ball, Choo-Choo, Fancy-Fancy, Spook, and Brain — as they run…
⭐ Fun Fact
Though its first run lasted just one 30-episode season, 'Top Cat' became enormously popular abroad — in Mexico it is a beloved cultural institution, known as 'Don Gato', far more famous there than in its country of origin.
🧦
2007–present
Dusty the Klepto Cat
The cat burglar who stole a whole neighbourhood
Dusty, a grey-and-white cat from San Mateo, California, earned his nickname the honest way — by stealing. Over several years he lifted an astonishing haul of objects from his neighbours' gardens and porches, dragging home swimming trunks, gloves, socks, sponges, dish towels, children's toys and even a bikini top,…
⭐ Fun Fact
At the height of his career Dusty was estimated to have stolen well over six hundred separate items — and on his most ambitious nights he made several thieving trips before dawn.
🎀
1974–present
Hello Kitty
The little bow-wearing character on everything
Hello Kitty is one of the most recognisable characters on the planet — a small, round-faced figure with a red bow, no visible mouth, and a presence on everything from pencil cases to aeroplanes. She was created in 1974 by designer Yuko Shimizu for the Japanese company Sanrio, first appearing on a small vinyl coin…
⭐ Fun Fact
Hello Kitty is deliberately drawn without a mouth so that people can read whatever emotion they are feeling into her expression — a design choice Sanrio says is central to her universal appeal.
😼
1997–2002
Mr. Bigglesworth
The hairless cat of a comedy supervillain
Mr. Bigglesworth is the beloved pet of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers spy-comedy films, a direct parody of the fluffy white Persian stroked by the Bond villain Blofeld. The joke is that when Dr. Evil is unfrozen after decades in cryostasis, his once-luxuriant cat has lost all its fur — leaving a wrinkled, hairless…
⭐ Fun Fact
Mr. Bigglesworth was played by Sphynx cats — the naturally hairless breed — chosen precisely so the gag about Dr. Evil's once-fluffy cat losing its fur in deep freeze would land visually.
👑
1970
Duchess
The elegant mother cat of Disney’s Aristocats
Duchess is the graceful heroine of Disney's 1970 animated film The Aristocats. A pampered white Turkish Angora with blue eyes and a gentle, refined manner, she lives in luxury in a Parisian mansion with her three kittens — Toulouse, Berlioz and Marie.
The plot turns on an inheritance: their wealthy owner plans to…
⭐ Fun Fact
Duchess was voiced by actress Eva Gabor, who a few years later also voiced Disney's Miss Bianca in The Rescuers — making her the voice of two of the studio's most genteel animal heroines.
🐈⬛
1989–present
Snowball (The Simpsons)
The Simpsons’ ever-replaced family cat
Snowball is the Simpson family cat in the long-running animated series The Simpsons, and the subject of one of the show's most enduring running gags. Despite the name, the family's current cat is jet black — a joke that unfolds across the series' history.
The original Snowball, a white cat, died before the events of…
⭐ Fun Fact
To sidestep continuity, the Simpsons writers had Lisa rename a brand-new black cat 'Snowball II' — joking it would save the family the cost of buying a new food bowl with a different name on it.
🧹
1989
Jiji
The wry black cat who flies shotgun on a witch's broomstick
Jiji is the sardonic black cat who accompanies the young witch Kiki in Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 Studio Ghibli film 'Kiki's Delivery Service', adapted from Eiko Kadono's novel. Small, glossy and permanently unimpressed, he is part familiar, part travelling companion and part running commentary on his witch's…
⭐ Fun Fact
In the original Japanese, Jiji is voiced by a woman, Rei Sakuma, giving him a light, wry delivery; the 1998 English dub cast the comedian Phil Hartman, who recorded the part shortly before his death, and the film is dedicated to his memory.
🪙
1996
Meowth
The talking cat Pokémon who taught himself to speak
Meowth is one of the original 151 Pokémon, introduced in the 1996 Game Boy games Pokémon Red and Green, and by some distance the most famous cat in the franchise. A cream-coloured feline with a gold charm — the koban, an Edo-period Japanese coin — set into his forehead, he is loosely modelled on the maneki-neko, the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Meowth's Japanese name, Nyarth, combines 'nya' — the Japanese equivalent of 'meow' — with the sound of a coin; and the gold oval on his head is a real historical object, the koban, a gold coin used in Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
🔵
1969
Doraemon
The earless robot cat sent back from the 22nd century
Doraemon is a blue robotic cat from the twenty-second century, sent back in time to help a hapless schoolboy named Nobita Nobi avoid a future of failure and debt. Created by the manga duo Fujiko Fujio in 1969, he has become one of the most beloved characters in Japan and across much of Asia, with a manga run of tens…
⭐ Fun Fact
Doraemon's official date of manufacture is 3 September 2112, and to mark the hundred-year countdown to his 'birth', Japanese authorities registered him as an official resident of Kawasaki, the city where his creators' museum stands.
🐙
2019
Goose
The orange tabby who is not, in fact, a cat at all
Goose appears in Marvel's 2019 film 'Captain Marvel' as an ordinary ginger tabby living in a Air Force facility, and proceeds to steal every scene he is in — first by charming Nick Fury completely, and then by revealing that he is a Flerken: an alien species that merely resembles a house cat, and that stores a set of…
⭐ Fun Fact
The film's crew created a distinct 'Flerken' vocal and physical performance for the tentacle scenes, but the most famous shot of Goose swallowing an object whole is largely practical trickery around a real cat — and Reggie, the lead cat, became enough of a fan favourite to earn his own promotional interviews.
🪦
1983
Church
The family cat who came back wrong — Stephen King's most unsettling animal
Winston Churchill — Church to the family — is the Creeds' cat in Stephen King's 1983 novel 'Pet Sematary', and one of the most quietly horrifying animals in modern fiction. A large, affectionate creature belonging to young Ellie Creed, he is killed on the road outside the family's new Maine home, and buried by her…
⭐ Fun Fact
The cats who played Church in the 2019 adaptation were rescues from a shelter in Canada, and at least one of them was adopted by a member of the production after filming — an unusually cheerful footnote for the bleakest story King says he ever wrote.
🇺🇸
1902–1906
Tom Quartz
The White House kitten who ambushed a Speaker of the House
Theodore Roosevelt's White House was famously overrun with animals — badgers, snakes, a pony taken upstairs in a lift — and among them was a small grey kitten named Tom Quartz, borrowed from Mark Twain. Twain's sketch 'Dick Baker's Cat' features a mining cat of that name, and Roosevelt, an enthusiastic reader, applied…
⭐ Fun Fact
Roosevelt named the kitten after a cat in a Mark Twain story — and Twain and Roosevelt, who disagreed sharply about American foreign policy, thus share credit for one of the best-remembered animals ever to live in the White House.
🐟
2003
Rusik
The stray kitten who became Russia's only sturgeon-detecting police cat
In 2003, officers at a police checkpoint in Stavropol Krai, southern Russia, took in a stray kitten they named Rusik. The region sits on a smuggling route for illegally-caught sturgeon from the Caspian Sea — a trade in caviar and fish worth a great deal of money — and searching vehicles for hidden catches was slow,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Police at the checkpoint reportedly considered training more cats after Rusik's success, but concluded that his talent was less a matter of training than of appetite — he was simply, and unusually, devoted to sturgeon.
⭐
1997–2020
Homer
A kitten who lost both eyes and became an advocate for unadoptable animals
Homer was a small black kitten taken to a Miami veterinary clinic in 1997 with an eye infection so severe that both eyes had to be removed. Blind, tiny and considered unadoptable, he was offered around without success until the vet called a former client, Gwen Cooper, who agreed to take him largely because nobody else…
⭐ Fun Fact
Gwen Cooper has donated a portion of the book's proceeds to animal rescue and welfare organisations for years, and 'Homer's Odyssey' is frequently cited by shelters as the single piece of writing that most reliably persuades people to adopt a blind cat.
🏺
c. 14th century BC
Ta-miu
The Egyptian prince’s cat who was buried like royalty
Ta-miu is the earliest named pet cat whose burial we can still see. Her name is usually translated simply as "she-cat" — the Egyptian word for cat, given a feminine ending — and she belonged to Crown Prince Thutmose, eldest son of the pharaoh Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, in Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty. Thutmose held…
⭐ Fun Fact
Ta-miu’s name is essentially just "the female cat" — rather like naming a pet "Puss". The sarcophagus is catalogued in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, as JE 30172.
🔬
1990s
Snowball
The cat whose DNA solved a murder — a world first
Snowball was an ordinary white cat living on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and he is the reason non-human DNA has a place in criminal courts. In October 1994 a car was found abandoned near Tyne Valley with its licence plates removed and blood spattered inside. It belonged to Shirley Ann Duguay, a 32-year-old mother of…
⭐ Fun Fact
The scientists had to test twenty other Prince Edward Island cats first — not to find the culprit, but to prove that the island’s cats were not all so closely related that a DNA match would be worthless.
🌙
Traditional — no documented dates
Muezza
The cat of Islamic tradition — a beloved story, not a documented one
Muezza — Mu'izza in Arabic — is the name given in popular tradition to a cat said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad. It is important to be clear at the outset about what kind of story this is. No cat of this name appears in any verified hadith, the authenticated records of the Prophet's sayings and actions, and…
⭐ Fun Fact
The companion Abu Hurayra, whose nickname means "father of the kitten", is one of the most frequently cited transmitters of hadith in Islamic tradition — a reminder that the affection for cats in the sources is well attested even where the Muezza story itself is not.
🏰
1997
Mrs Norris
The caretaker’s informant, prowling the Hogwarts corridors
Mrs Norris is the scrawny, dust-coloured cat belonging to Argus Filch, the embittered caretaker of Hogwarts, in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. Described with bulging, lamp-like yellow eyes and a skeletal frame, she is introduced early in Philosopher's Stone as a creature students learn to dread on sight, because…
⭐ Fun Fact
Rowling borrowed the name from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where Mrs Norris is a meddling busybody who hovers in the background of every scene — exactly the role the cat plays at Hogwarts.
😼
1950
Lucifer
The scheming house cat of Disney’s Cinderella
Lucifer is the fat, sly, ill-tempered cat belonging to Lady Tremaine in Disney's 1950 animated feature Cinderella. He is his mistress in miniature: pampered, spiteful and entirely comfortable with the household's cruelty toward Cinderella, whom he torments in small, deniable ways whenever the opportunity arises.
His…
⭐ Fun Fact
Lucifer never speaks a word — his entire performance is hisses, snarls and yowls supplied by June Foray, who went on to voice Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Granny in the Looney Tunes shorts.
🎖
c. 1854–1856
Crimean Tom
The tabby who led starving soldiers to hidden food stores after the siege of Sevastopol
When Allied troops finally entered Sevastopol in September 1855, after a siege lasting almost a year, they walked into a ruined city with almost nothing left to eat. The Russian defenders had withdrawn, the supply situation on the Allied side was notoriously bad, and men who had survived the winter in the trenches now…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tom is one of the very few Crimean War veterans you can still visit — his taxidermied body is held by the National Army Museum in London, having survived rather better than most of the regiments that fought there.
🖖
1990–2002 (screen appearances)
Spot
The starship cat owned by an android learning what it means to care about something
Spot belonged to Data, the android officer aboard the USS Enterprise-D, and served a rather more sophisticated purpose in Star Trek: The Next Generation than most television pets. Data spent seven seasons trying to understand human emotion from the outside, and the writers gave him a cat — an animal that is famously…
⭐ Fun Fact
Data's poem 'Ode to Spot' has been reproduced, quoted and set to music countless times since it aired in 1992, and remains one of the most frequently recited pieces of verse in the entire Star Trek canon.
🍔
c. 2003–present
Happy Cat
The grinning British Shorthair behind 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' and the entire LOLcat era
A photograph of a wide-mouthed, apparently delighted grey British Shorthair began circulating on internet message boards in the early 2000s. Nobody has ever conclusively established who took it or who the cat was — the most-repeated account traces it to a Russian cat food advertisement, but the trail is thin and the…
⭐ Fun Fact
The lolspeak dialect Happy Cat's caption launched was taken seriously enough that a crowdsourced project spent years translating the entire Bible into it, completing the New Testament in 2008.
🎬
1986 (Japan) / 1989 (international)
Milo
The ginger kitten who carried a feature film with no human actors at all
The Adventures of Milo and Otis is a curious object: a full-length feature film, released in Japan in 1986 as Koneko Monogatari, starring an orange tabby kitten and a pug, with no human characters on screen and a single narrator supplying every voice. It was an enormous success, becoming one of the highest-grossing…
⭐ Fun Fact
Because kittens grow so fast and the shoot ran for four years, multiple cats played Milo — with reports suggesting well over a dozen tabby kittens were used across the production.
🚽
2000–2010 (screen appearances)
Mr. Jinx
The toilet-trained Himalayan who stole three films from Robert De Niro
Mr. Jinx — Jinxie to his owner — is the Himalayan cat belonging to Jack Byrnes, the retired CIA officer played by Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents and its two sequels. He is, in the mechanics of the film, a device: Jack's absurd devotion to his cat is the clearest evidence of how impossible he will be to please, and…
⭐ Fun Fact
The role was shared by two Himalayan brothers, Bailey and Misha, and the famous toilet-flushing shot was performed for real by a trained cat rather than faked in post-production.
🧬
2004–?
Little Nicky
The first cat created for a paying customer
Little Nicky holds a strange and pioneering place in history as the world's first commercially cloned pet. In 2004 a woman in Texas, grieving the death of her seventeen-year-old Maine Coon named Nicky, paid the company Genetic Savings & Clone a reported 50,000 US dollars to produce a genetic copy from tissue that had…
⭐ Fun Fact
Little Nicky followed CC ("CopyCat"), the first-ever cloned cat born in a 2001 research project — but he was the first cloned specifically as a commercial pet.
📏
1989–?
Corduroy
A Guinness record for the oldest living cat
In 2015 an orange-and-white cat from Oregon named Corduroy was recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest living cat, at the age of twenty-six. Born in 1989, "Cordy" had by then outlived the ordinary feline lifespan more than twice over, and his owner Ashley Reed Okura — who had adopted him as a small child —…
⭐ Fun Fact
Corduroy shared his birth year, 1989, with his owner's early childhood — she had known him essentially her whole life.
🎭
1930s–present (lineage)
Hamlet
The resident cat of a literary landmark
Since the 1930s the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan — famous as the home of the "Algonquin Round Table" of writers and wits — has kept a resident cat, and by long tradition every male in the line is named Hamlet while every female is named Matilda. The custom is said to have begun when a stray wandered into the…
⭐ Fun Fact
By hotel tradition every male Algonquin cat is a Hamlet and every female a Matilda — a naming rule kept unbroken for generations.
🕵️
2005–2006
Fred the Undercover Kitty
A rescue kitten who helped catch a fake vet
Fred was an abandoned kitten rescued in Brooklyn in 2005, taken in as a foster by an assistant district attorney after he survived a serious bout of pneumonia. He might have lived an ordinary life had prosecutors not needed, of all things, a cat. They were building a case against a man posing as a licensed…
⭐ Fun Fact
Fred received a posthumous "Law Enforcement Achievement Award", and the Brooklyn DA created the annual Fred Award for animal welfare in his memory.
🦸
Rose to fame 2015
Masha
The stray cat who kept an abandoned baby alive
In January 2015, in the Russian city of Obninsk, a long-haired stray cat named Masha became an international sensation for what residents described as an act of quiet heroism. Masha was a well-known and much-loved fixture of one apartment block, fed and looked after by the people who lived there. One bitterly cold…
⭐ Fun Fact
Neighbours said Masha chased the ambulance as it drove the rescued baby away — as if reluctant to let her charge out of her sight.
🎨
2008–2018, famous from 2011
Zarathustra
The enormous ginger cat digitally painted into the great masterpieces of Western art
Zarathustra was a very large ginger cat who lived in St Petersburg and became, improbably, one of the most widely reproduced cats in the history of fine art. He was inherited by the artist Svetlana Petrova in 2008 after her mother died, and by her own account she was in a deep and immobilising grief when a friend…
⭐ Fun Fact
Petrova has said the whole project began because a friend told her that combining the two most popular things on the internet — cats and famous paintings — could not possibly fail.
🍜
Born 2015, famous from 2016
Hosico
The golden Scottish Straight whose resemblance to a bowl of ramen made him a global star
Hosico is a Scottish Straight with a thick golden-cream coat, enormous round amber eyes and a permanently slightly startled expression, and he has been one of the most-followed cats on the internet since 2016. His Moscow-based owner started photographing him as a kitten, and the account grew into an audience of…
⭐ Fun Fact
Hosico is a Scottish Straight, not a Scottish Fold — the same breed without the ear-cartilage mutation that causes painful joint disease in folded-ear cats.
⚖️
1977–1986
Himmy
The heaviest cat ever recorded — and the reason the record was retired
Himmy was a tabby from Cairns in Queensland, Australia, who in 1986 was recorded at 21.3 kilograms — a little over 46 pounds — making him the heaviest domestic cat ever formally documented. He measured 96.5 centimetres from nose to tail tip and had a girth of 84 centimetres, and by the end of his life he had to be…
⭐ Fun Fact
Guinness World Records retired the heaviest-cat category after Himmy, to avoid encouraging owners to overfeed their pets in pursuit of the title.
📏
Born 2016, record set 2018
Barivel
The Italian Maine Coon officially measured as the longest living domestic cat
Barivel is a Maine Coon from Vigevano in northern Italy who was measured by Guinness World Records in May 2018 at 120 centimetres — just under four feet — from nose to the tip of his tail, making him the longest living domestic cat in the world.
His name is a piece of Milanese dialect meaning, roughly, a joker or a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Barivel's name comes from Milanese dialect and translates roughly as "joker" or "layabout" — chosen for his famously unhurried temperament.
🎩
Written 1928–1940, published 1966
Behemoth
The enormous, vodka-drinking, pistol-wielding black cat of Russia's greatest satirical novel
Behemoth — Begemot in the Russian — is a demon in the retinue of Woland, the devil who arrives in 1930s Moscow at the start of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and he takes the form of an enormous black cat the size of a pig who walks on his hind legs, talks, pays for tram tickets, drinks vodka, plays…
⭐ Fun Fact
Behemoth pays his tram fare like any other passenger — and is outraged when the conductor objects to a cat riding the tram at all.
📚
1938–1972
Orlando
The marmalade cat of nineteen lavishly lithographed picture books, drawn from a real stray
Orlando the Marmalade Cat was created by the British artist and writer Kathleen Hale, who published the first book in 1938 and continued the series for more than three decades, producing nineteen volumes in all. Orlando lives with his wife Grace and their three kittens — Pansy, Blanche and Tinkle — and the books…
⭐ Fun Fact
Kathleen Hale drew straight onto the lithographic plates herself, which is why the colours in the original Orlando books are so much richer than most picture books of the 1940s.
🌙
1991–present
Luna
The talking black cat who started it all
Luna is the black cat with a golden crescent moon on her forehead who appears in Naoko Takeuchi's 'Sailor Moon', first serialised as a manga in 1991 and adapted into one of the most widely exported anime series of the 1990s. She is the character who sets the entire story in motion: she finds an ordinary, unmotivated…
⭐ Fun Fact
Luna is the reason the series exists at all in-universe — without the cat approaching Usagi in the street and giving her the transformation brooch, there is no Sailor Moon. The story's entire premise rests on a cat deciding to talk to somebody.
🎷
1970
Thomas O'Malley
The alley cat with the improbably long name
Abraham de Lacy Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley — a name he delivers in full, and with considerable relish — is the ginger alley cat at the centre of Disney's 1970 animated feature 'The Aristocats'. Voiced by Phil Harris, who had already given Disney the bear Baloo two years earlier, O'Malley is the streetwise…
⭐ Fun Fact
His full name is a joke about pretension from a cat who has none — an alley cat with no home and no owner announcing himself with four forenames, delivered to a pedigree who has all the breeding and none of the swagger.
🐾
1993
Sassy
The Himalayan who crossed a wilderness with two dogs
Sassy is the Himalayan cat who makes the journey of the title in Disney's 1993 film 'Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey', voiced with dry, superior impatience by Sally Field. Left behind at a ranch while their family moves away, Sassy sets off across the American wilderness with two dogs — the elderly Shadow and…
⭐ Fun Fact
The 1963 original had the animals travel in total silence with only a narrator, and the cat was a Siamese called Tao. Sassy's running commentary was invented for the 1993 remake — and became the reason most people remember the newer film.
🎩
1957
The Cat in the Hat
The children's book character written on a word list
The tall, red-and-white-hatted cat created by Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, arrived in 1957 and changed how children were taught to read in the English-speaking world. He turns up uninvited at the home of two bored children on a wet afternoon, causes a great deal of chaos, and tidies it all away before their…
⭐ Fun Fact
The book was written under a severe constraint — Geisel was working from a list of words that young readers were expected to recognise, and the celebrated bouncing rhythm is a direct consequence of having so few words to build with.
😺
18th century
Jeoffry
The cat immortalised in one of English poetry’s most beloved passages
Jeoffry was the pet cat of the English poet Christopher Smart, and the sole companion of his confinement. In the 1760s Smart was held in an asylum, cut off from friends and society, and it was there that he wrote the sprawling religious poem 'Jubilate Agno'. Buried within it is a passage of around seventy lines…
⭐ Fun Fact
Smart's lines about Jeoffry washing and stretching each morning were written from close daily observation during his confinement — and centuries later Benjamin Britten set them to music in his cantata 'Rejoice in the Lamb'.
🕵️
First published 1939
Macavity
The 'Napoleon of Crime' — T. S. Eliot's ginger master-criminal who is never at the scene
Macavity is the villain of T. S. Eliot's 1939 collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, a book of comic poems the famously austere poet wrote for his godchildren under the nickname "Old Possum". In the poem that bears his name, Macavity is a "Mystery Cat", a "master criminal" and the "Napoleon of Crime" — a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Eliot modelled Macavity on Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty — Conan Doyle's Moriarty is called 'the Napoleon of crime', the exact phrase Eliot gives his cat.
😼
Since 1988
Cat
The impossibly vain humanoid who evolved from a ship’s cat three million years out in deep space
Cat is one of the central characters of Red Dwarf, the British science-fiction sitcom that first aired on the BBC in 1988 and has returned in fits and starts ever since. His origin is one of the show's neatest ideas: the last surviving human, Dave Lister, smuggles a pregnant cat named Frankenstein aboard the mining…
⭐ Fun Fact
The cats aboard Red Dwarf evolved from a single pet named Frankenstein — and even developed their own religion, casting Lister as an unwitting god they call the "Cloister".
🙀
Since 1983
Bill the Cat
The dishevelled, tongue-lolling comic-strip cat whose entire vocabulary is essentially "Ack!"
Bill the Cat, also known as Bill D. Cat, is a fictional cat created by cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, first appearing in his comic strip Bloom County in 1983. He was conceived as a deliberate, pointed parody of Garfield — where Jim Davis's cat is plump, sardonic and merchandisable, Bill is a hideous, matted, wild-eyed…
⭐ Fun Fact
Bill the Cat once ran for President of the United States as the running mate of Opus the penguin on the "Meadow Party" ticket — campaigning, more or less, on a platform of hairballs and the word "Ack!".
📮
c. 1950 – 1964
Tibs the Great
The British Post Office's self-styled 'number one cat', a vast tabby who kept London's postal headquarters completely free of mice for fourteen years.
Tibs the Great was, by the reckoning of the General Post Office itself, its 'number one cat' — the most celebrated of the long line of official felines Britain's Post Office kept on the payroll to protect the mail from mice. Based at the Post Office headquarters in London, Tibs spent some fourteen years on active…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tibs weighed around 23 pounds — a genuinely huge cat — and when he died in 1964 several national newspapers ran obituaries for the Post Office's 'number one cat'.
🚌
Since 1988
Catbus
The grinning, twelve-legged cat-shaped bus of Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro, whose hollow, furry body carries passengers through the countryside.
Catbus is one of the most beloved and surreal creations in all of animation: a fictional character in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro. As its name suggests, it is a cat and a bus at once — a large, grinning creature with a broad Cheshire smile, glowing eyes that double as headlamps, a great…
⭐ Fun Fact
Catbus runs on twelve legs rather than wheels, and its rolled destination sign flips through a series of whimsical, hand-drawn stops as it goes.
😎
Since 2008
Pete the Cat
The unflappably groovy blue cat of the bestselling children's picture books, whose motto is that no matter what goes wrong, it's all good.
Pete the Cat is a fictional cartoon cat created by the American artist James Dean, and one of the most successful picture-book characters of the modern era. A laid-back blue cat with half-closed, easy-going eyes, Pete first padded onto the page in a series of four books illustrated by Dean with text by Eric Litwin,…
⭐ Fun Fact
Pete's very first book, 'I Love My White Shoes', follows him cheerfully singing on even as his brand-new shoes turn red, blue and brown — because it's all good.
🐈
2001 – 2002
Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat
The inquisitive Siamese kitten of the PBS Kids series, whose family of calligraphy-cats explains how Siamese cats supposedly got their markings.
Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat — usually known simply as Sagwa — is the star of a children's animated television series based on the picture book 'The Chinese Siamese Cat' created by the novelist Amy Tan. Produced by the Canadian studio CinéGroupe together with Sesame Workshop, the show aired on PBS Kids and followed…
⭐ Fun Fact
In Sagwa's world, Siamese cats get their dark ears, paws and tails when the once-white kittens tumble into a pot of the magistrate's writing ink — a whimsical origin story for the breed's real colour-point markings.
😻
2003 – 2011 (photo series)
Fukumaru
The odd-eyed cat whose tender photographs beside an elderly Japanese farmer became a beloved book celebrating an unlikely friendship.
Fukumaru was a plump, odd-eyed cat — one eye blue, one gold — who found lasting fame not through antics or memes but through a series of gentle, deeply human photographs. He was adopted by Misao, the elderly grandmother of the Japanese photographer Miyoko Ihara, and over the years Ihara documented the pair’s daily…
⭐ Fun Fact
Fukumaru had strikingly “odd” eyes — one blue and one yellow — a trait called heterochromia that is especially common in white cats, and which gave his gentle photographs an unforgettable gaze.
🐈
1955
Si and Am
The scheming, synchronised Siamese duo of Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, whose mischievous song became one of animation’s most memorable feline moments.
Si and Am are the pair of Siamese cats from Walt Disney’s 1955 animated classic “Lady and the Tramp,” and though they appear only briefly, they left an outsized mark on cinema’s gallery of famous cats. Belonging to Aunt Sarah, the two identical, slinky Siamese slink into the home and immediately set about causing…
⭐ Fun Fact
Si and Am’s show-stopping “Siamese Cat Song” was written and voiced by Peggy Lee, who co-wrote much of the film’s music and voiced several of its characters.
🐈⬛
1993
Thackery Binx
The immortal black cat of Disney’s Hocus Pocus — a boy cursed into feline form for three centuries, and the reluctant guide who helps foil the Sanderson sisters.
Thackery Binx is the heroic black cat at the heart of Disney’s 1993 Halloween favourite “Hocus Pocus.” In the film’s prologue, set in Salem in 1693, Thackery is a young man who fails to save his little sister Emily from the witch-sisters Winifred, Mary and Sarah Sanderson. As punishment, Winifred curses him into the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Binx was created on screen using a blend of real black cats, animatronic puppets and pioneering (for the time) computer animation to make his mouth move — with his voice provided by a different actor than the one who played his human form.
🐱
1991–1996
Stimpy (Stimpson J. Cat)
The dim, good-natured red-and-white cat of The Ren & Stimpy Show, whose gross-out gags and boundless optimism helped reshape 1990s animation.
Stimpson J. Cat — Stimpy to everyone — is the rotund, big-nosed red-and-white cat who forms one half of the title duo in “The Ren & Stimpy Show,” the cult Nickelodeon cartoon that first aired in 1991. Paired with the high-strung, perpetually furious chihuahua Ren Höek, Stimpy is the cheerful, dim-witted foil:…
⭐ Fun Fact
The show’s famous “Happy Happy Joy Joy” song, sung by the ever-cheerful Stimpy, became one of its most enduring cultural touchstones — quoted and parodied long after the series ended.
🐈
1963 onwards
Blofeld's White Persian
The fluffy white Persian cradled by James Bond’s arch-villain Blofeld — cinema’s definitive “supervillain’s cat” and one of film’s most parodied images.
The unnamed white Persian cat draped across the lap of Ernst Stavro Blofeld is one of the most instantly recognisable images in all of cinema. As the pet of the head of SPECTRE — James Bond’s recurring criminal mastermind — the cat became visual shorthand for calculated, stroking-a-cat villainy, and it has been…
⭐ Fun Fact
The cat’s fame directly inspired Dr. Evil’s hairless companion Mr. Bigglesworth in the Austin Powers films — itself now one of the most famous parody cats in cinema.
🐈
1973 onwards
Heathcliff
The mischievous orange tomcat of the long-running newspaper comic strip and animated series — a streetwise troublemaker who predated and rivalled Garfield.
Heathcliff is the swaggering orange tabby created by cartoonist George Gately, who first appeared in a newspaper comic strip in 1973 — a full five years before Garfield — and went on to become a syndicated fixture in papers around the world. Where the later Garfield was a lazy, lasagne-loving homebody, Heathcliff is…
⭐ Fun Fact
Heathcliff first appeared in newspapers in 1973, predating Garfield’s 1978 debut by five years, making him one of the original stars of the modern comic-strip cat boom.
🐈⬛
1999 onwards
Snowbell
The pampered, put-upon white house cat of the Stuart Little films — a grumbling feline who must share his home with a talking mouse he was quite sure he was supposed to eat.
Snowbell is the fluffy white cat of the Little family in the hugely popular Stuart Little films, adapted from E. B. White's classic children's novel. Voiced with dry, exasperated wit by Nathan Lane in the movies, Snowbell is the comic heart of the story: a cat who wakes up one day to discover that his family has…
⭐ Fun Fact
In the films Snowbell is voiced by Nathan Lane, while the on-screen cat was played by a group of trained Persian and Chinchilla cats standing in for one another across different scenes.
🐈
2008
Prince Chunk
A giant orange tabby found as a stray in New Jersey, whose enormous size and rags-to-riches rescue story made him a media sensation across America.
Prince Chunk was a very large orange tabby who shot to fame in the United States in 2008 after being found as a stray in New Jersey and taken in by a local animal shelter. Tipping the scales at around twenty pounds, the good-natured giant made headlines partly for his sheer size and partly for the poignant…
⭐ Fun Fact
Prince Chunk's fame inspired a charitable foundation created in his name to help struggling families with the costs of keeping or rehoming their pets.
🏔️
2017–present
Suki
A strikingly marked Bengal cat from Canada whose leash-trained hikes through mountains, lakes and forests turned her into one of the internet's best-loved adventure cats.
Suki is a Bengal cat living in Alberta, Canada, who became an Instagram sensation for a very unusual reason: rather than lounging on a sofa, she spends her days hiking through some of Western Canada's most spectacular scenery. Her owner, photographer Martina Gutfreund, wanted a companion she could take on outdoor…
⭐ Fun Fact
Suki is always wearing a safety leash outdoors — in many of her most breathtaking photos it has simply been edited out afterwards to give a cleaner image.
📷
2010s
Cooper
A Seattle house cat who wore a tiny camera on his collar one day a week, unknowingly shooting a cat's-eye view of the neighbourhood that became gallery exhibitions and a book.
Cooper was an American Shorthair from Seattle whose owners, Michael and Deirdre Cross, were curious about what he got up to on his daily wanderings. Their answer was ingenious: they fitted a small, lightweight digital camera to his collar, set to snap a photograph automatically every couple of minutes, and let him…
⭐ Fun Fact
Cooper only 'worked' one day a week — his camera was set to fire automatically every two minutes, so every photograph he took was a complete accident.
⚓
1941–1942
Convoy
The much-loved ship's cat of the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hermione, so fully a member of the crew that he was entered on the ship's books and given his own miniature hammock to sleep in.
Convoy was the ship's cat aboard the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hermione during the Second World War, and he took his name from the convoy-escort work that was the ship's mission. Far from being a mere mascot, Convoy was treated as a proper member of the crew: he was entered on the ship's official books and was even…
⭐ Fun Fact
Convoy was so thoroughly regarded as one of the crew that he was formally listed on HMS Hermione's books — hammock and all.
🐈⬛
2014–present
Rademenes
A black cat who arrived at a Polish shelter close to death and, once recovered, took to comforting other sick and post-operative animals — earning worldwide fame as the shelter's gentle 'nurse cat'.
Rademenes came to an animal shelter in Bydgoszcz, in northern Poland, as a two-month-old kitten so ill with a severe respiratory infection that staff feared he would not survive. They began treatment anyway, and the little black cat pulled through. Rather than being rehomed, he stayed on at the shelter, and it was…
⭐ Fun Fact
Rademenes was named after a magical talking cat from a classic Polish children's television series.
🎩
1939
Mr. Mistoffelees
The 'Magical Mr. Mistoffelees' of T. S. Eliot's poems and the musical Cats — a conjuring, black-and-white tom whose show-stopping magic and dazzling dance made him one of theatre's best-loved felines.
Mr. Mistoffelees first appeared in T. S. Eliot's 1939 collection 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats', a set of witty, affectionate poems about a cast of characterful cats. In his own verse Eliot introduces him as the 'Original Conjuring Cat', a quiet, unassuming creature capable of astonishing feats of magic —…
⭐ Fun Fact
In the musical, Mistoffelees's big number is traditionally packed with rapid turns — the role is prized by dancers as one of the most athletic in all of musical theatre.
🐈⬛
1988–present
Scratchy
The endlessly long-suffering black cat of 'The Itchy & Scratchy Show', the gleefully violent cartoon-within-a-cartoon that Bart and Lisa Simpson adore.
Scratchy is a lanky black cat and one half of 'The Itchy & Scratchy Show', a fictional cartoon that the Simpson children watch and that gently parodies the slapstick ultra-violence of classic theatrical shorts like Tom and Jerry. He made his debut alongside his tormentor, Itchy the mouse, in a 1988 short on 'The…
⭐ Fun Fact
Because the show resets each time, Scratchy has been 'killed' in hundreds of increasingly absurd ways, yet always returns intact for the next short — a running gag about the indestructible logic of cartoon characters.
🎀
1970
Marie
The prim, pink-bowed white kitten of Disney's 'The Aristocats' — the poised little sister who insists that ladies do not start fights, but they can certainly finish them.
Marie is one of the three kittens at the heart of Disney's 1970 animated film 'The Aristocats', a fluffy white kitten distinguished by the pink bow between her ears and her air of delicate refinement. The daughter of the elegant Duchess and sister to her brothers Toulouse and Berlioz, Marie fancies herself the most…
⭐ Fun Fact
Marie's most quoted line — 'Ladies don't start fights, but they can finish them' — turned the tiny kitten into an unlikely style mascot, and she is now one of the most heavily merchandised characters Disney has ever drawn.
😼
2001
Mr. Tinkles
The megalomaniac white Persian villain of the 2001 comedy 'Cats & Dogs', a fluffy criminal mastermind scheming to take over the world one sneeze at a time.
Mr. Tinkles is the deliciously evil antagonist of the 2001 live-action family comedy 'Cats & Dogs', which imagines a secret, high-tech war waged between cats and dogs just out of human sight. A pristine white Persian belonging to an oblivious family, Mr. Tinkles hides a grandiose criminal genius behind his pampered,…
⭐ Fun Fact
For all his world-conquering ambition, Mr. Tinkles is regularly undone by the indignities of house-cat life — including being forced into a tiny cowboy outfit by the children of the family he lives with.
😾
c. 2018–present
Smudge
The unimpressed white cat behind 'Woman Yelling at a Cat', one of the most recognisable internet memes of all time, forever recoiling from a plate of salad.
Smudge is a white cat from Canada who, quite by accident, became the feline half of one of the internet's most enduring memes. In 2018 his owner shared a photo of him seated at a dinner table, leaning back from a plate of vegetables with a look of pure, narrow-eyed disgust. On its own it was just a funny cat picture,…
⭐ Fun Fact
The vegetables Smudge is recoiling from were part of a salad — his owner has said he is generally a fairly happy cat, and the legendary look of disgust was just a fleeting moment perfectly captured by the camera.
🐈
c. 2018–present
Stepan
The Ukrainian internet-famous cat whose relaxed, wine-glass photos won millions of followers — and who became a symbol of resilience after fleeing the 2022 invasion.
Stepan is a tabby cat from Kharkiv, Ukraine, who built a huge online following through beautifully deadpan photos of himself lounging at home, often pictured beside a glass of wine with the air of a cat thoroughly at ease with life. His unbothered elegance struck a chord, and over the years his social-media audience…
⭐ Fun Fact
Stepan's fame was harnessed for good after 2022: campaigns featuring him helped raise substantial donations for charities supporting animals and displaced people affected by the war in Ukraine.
🐈
c. 2004
Mr. Peebles
An Illinois cat recognised as one of the smallest in the world, a fully grown adult who stayed kitten-sized because of a rare genetic quirk.
Mr. Peebles was a short-haired cat from Illinois who earned worldwide attention in 2004 as one of the smallest cats ever recorded. Fully grown, he stood only a few inches tall and weighed around three pounds — closer to the size of a young kitten than an adult cat — yet he was perfectly proportioned and otherwise…
⭐ Fun Fact
Mr. Peebles' miniature size was caused by a genetic condition that stunted his growth — he was a fully grown adult cat who remained roughly the size of a kitten his whole life.
🐱
1935–1952
Dusty
A tabby from Texas credited as the most prolific cat ever recorded, said to have given birth to an astonishing number of kittens across her long life.
Dusty was a tabby cat from Bonham, Texas, remembered for a record that still astonishes: over the course of her life she is reported to have produced well over four hundred kittens, a figure that made her the most prolific domestic cat on record. Her extraordinary output was recorded through the middle of the…
⭐ Fun Fact
Dusty's record of more than 400 kittens dates from the 1930s to 1950s, long before routine neutering — a reminder of how prolifically cats can breed when left unspayed.
🐈
2011–present
Cake
The stretchy, wisecracking cat from Adventure Time's alternate universe — a feline counterpart to Jake the Dog and loyal companion to the adventurer Fionna.
Cake is a magical, elastic cat from the animated series Adventure Time, introduced as part of a gender-swapped version of the show's world. Where the original stars are the human boy Finn and his shape-shifting dog Jake, this alternate universe swaps them for the adventurer Fionna and her cat, Cake — Cake standing in…
⭐ Fun Fact
Cake was created as the cat counterpart to Jake the Dog for Adventure Time's gender-swapped universe, and proved popular enough to eventually headline her own spin-off series alongside Fionna.
🐱
2009–present
Venus the Two-Face Cat
The chimera cat whose face is split perfectly down the middle into black and orange.
Venus is a tortoiseshell cat who became a global internet sensation thanks to her extraordinary face, which is divided almost exactly in half — one side solid black, the other orange tabby — with a striking blue eye on one side and a green eye on the other.
Discovered on a farm and adopted as a kitten, Venus shot to…
⭐ Fun Fact
Venus has one bright blue eye and one green eye, a difference that adds to the uncanny symmetry of her perfectly split black-and-orange face.
😻
2011–present
Monty the Cat
The cat born without a nasal bridge who became a symbol of accepting differences.
Monty is a rescue cat born without a nasal bridge bone, a chromosomal difference that gives his face a distinctive flattened, snuffly appearance. Rather than hiding his unusual look, his owners shared it openly, and Monty grew into a much-loved internet figure with a large, warm-hearted following.
His fame carried a…
⭐ Fun Fact
Monty's flat-faced look comes from being born without a nasal bridge bone, and despite occasional sneezing he lives a completely happy, healthy life.
🐱
2010s
Kunkush
The refugee cat separated from his family and reunited across a continent by strangers.
Kunkush was a fluffy white cat who fled Iraq with his family, carried in a basket as they made the dangerous crossing to the Greek island of Lesbos. In the chaos of arrival his basket broke and Kunkush bolted, becoming separated from the family he had travelled so far with.
Volunteers found the frightened, hungry cat…
⭐ Fun Fact
Kunkush's rescuers set up dedicated social-media pages that were shared around the world, and it was that online campaign that finally reconnected him with his family in Norway.
🏔️
2010s–present
Gary the Adventure Cat
The Canadian cat who hikes, climbs and canoes through the Rocky Mountains.
Gary is a fluffy adventure cat from Canada who became an online favourite for accompanying his owner into the great outdoors of the Rocky Mountains. Rather than staying home, Gary joins hikes, climbs and canoe trips, calmly perched in a backpack or padding along mountain trails on a harness.
His photogenic…
⭐ Fun Fact
Gary explores the outdoors wearing a proper harness and often rides in a backpack, letting him safely tag along on climbs and canoe trips through the Canadian Rockies.
🗳️
2015
Barsik
The cat who topped an unofficial online poll to be mayor of a Russian city.
In 2015, residents of the Siberian city of Barnaul, frustrated with their political choices, threw their support behind an unexpected candidate in an informal online poll about who should be mayor: a placid grey-and-white cat named Barsik.
Barsik's candidacy was a light-hearted protest, a way for locals to register…
⭐ Fun Fact
Barsik never held any real power — cats cannot run for office — but his tongue-in-cheek mayoral 'bid' made headlines internationally as a witty form of protest.
📏
2010s–present
Omar
The enormous Australian Maine Coon hailed as possibly the world's longest cat.
Omar is a Maine Coon from Melbourne, Australia, who shot to international fame in 2018 when photos of his sheer size went viral. Measured at around 120 centimetres, the giant ginger cat was celebrated as potentially the world's longest domestic cat, dwarfing ordinary house cats.
His owner has said that Omar started…
⭐ Fun Fact
Omar was reported to stretch to roughly 120 centimetres in length, putting the big ginger Maine Coon in contention for the title of world's longest cat.
⛪
1820s
Micetto
The Vatican-born cat raised in a pope's robes and later given to a famous French writer.
Micetto was a greyish-red cat with darker stripes, said to have been born in the Vatican and raised as a kitten in the folds of Pope Leo XII's robes. The pope was devoted to the cat, who reportedly kept him company during audiences and quiet hours, becoming one of the best-known papal pets in history.
After Leo XII…
⭐ Fun Fact
Micetto was reportedly raised inside the folds of Pope Leo XII's robe as a kitten, and after the pope's death was passed to the writer Chateaubriand, who cherished him in France.
📻
1920s
Tiger
President Coolidge's grey cat who once went missing and prompted a nationwide radio appeal.
Tiger was a grey striped cat belonging to President Calvin Coolidge, one of several animals in the famously pet-filled Coolidge White House. The cat was often seen draped around the president's neck like a scarf, an image that delighted staff and visitors alike.
Tiger became national news when he wandered away from…
⭐ Fun Fact
When Tiger went missing, President Coolidge had a description of the cat broadcast over the radio, and the wandering pet was later found and returned.
🏛️
1970s
Misty Malarky Ying Yang
The Siamese cat with the memorable name who lived in the White House with Amy Carter.
Misty Malarky Ying Yang was a Siamese cat belonging to Amy Carter, the young daughter of President Jimmy Carter, during his time in the White House in the late 1970s. With her striking looks and unforgettable name, the cat became one of the era's better-known presidential pets.
As a Siamese, Misty had the breed's…
⭐ Fun Fact
The cat's full name — Misty Malarky Ying Yang — is often cited as one of the most elaborate and memorable names ever given to a White House pet.
🐾
recognised 2002
Jake
The ginger tabby who entered the record books with 28 toes — seven on every paw.
Jake was a ginger tabby from Bonfield, Ontario, Canada, who earned a place in the Guinness World Records in 2002 for the most toes on a cat: an astonishing 28, with seven on each of his four paws.
Jake was polydactyl, a harmless and rather charming genetic quirk that gives some cats extra toes. What made him…
⭐ Fun Fact
A typical cat has 18 toes — five on each front paw and four on each back paw — so Jake's 28 gave him a full ten toes more than usual.
🐈
2010s
Cygnus Regulus Powers
The silver Maine Coon whose magnificent tail set the record for the longest ever on a domestic cat.
Cygnus Regulus Powers was a silver Maine Coon from Farmington Hills, Michigan, whose spectacular plume of a tail measured 44.66 cm (17.58 in) — the longest tail ever recorded on a domestic cat by Guinness World Records.
As a Maine Coon, one of the largest and most luxuriously coated of all cat breeds, Cygnus carried…
⭐ Fun Fact
Cygnus's tail was longer than many pet cats are from nose to tail-base, and his owner reported it took real grooming dedication to keep the silvery plume in show condition.
🐱
1999–2014
Frank and Louie
The two-faced 'Janus' cat who defied the odds to become the longest-surviving of his kind.
Frank and Louie, sometimes called Frankenlouie, was a Janus cat — born with a rare congenital condition called diprosopia that gave him two faces, with two mouths, two noses and three eyes sharing a single skull and one brain.
Born on 8 September 1999, he was brought to the Tufts University veterinary clinic in…
⭐ Fun Fact
Most Janus cats do not survive beyond their first day, which makes Frank and Louie's fifteen years all the more extraordinary.
🐈⬛
1970
Tarawood Antigone
The Burmese cat who delivered the largest litter of kittens ever recorded — nineteen in one go.
Tarawood Antigone was a brown Burmese cat from Oxfordshire, England, who on 7 August 1970 gave birth to the largest litter of domestic kittens ever recorded: an incredible nineteen in a single litter.
Four of the kittens were sadly stillborn, but fifteen survived — itself a record for live births in one litter. The…
⭐ Fun Fact
Of the fifteen surviving kittens, fourteen were male and only one was female — a strikingly lopsided outcome for such a huge litter.
🧟
2015
Bart
The Florida cat who was hit by a car, buried by his grieving owner, and clawed his way back out of the grave five days later.
Bart, a black-and-white tabby from Tampa, Florida, became world news in early 2015 in one of the most astonishing survival stories ever told about a cat. After he was struck by a car and appeared lifeless, his heartbroken owner's family buried him in a neighbour's garden.
Five days later, Bart was found alive —…
⭐ Fun Fact
The veterinary team that treated him affectionately dubbed him the 'zombie cat', a nickname that stuck as his story spread around the world.
😾
2000s–present
Garfi
The fluffy ginger Persian from Turkey whose permanently furious expression earned him the title 'the world's angriest cat'.
Garfi is a bright ginger Persian from Turkey whose photographs made him a viral sensation as 'the world's angriest cat'. In image after image he glowers at the camera with a scowl of such theatrical fury that he looks perpetually outraged by everything around him.
The truth, as his owner Hulya Ozkok has explained, is…
⭐ Fun Fact
Despite the ferocious photographs, Garfi is described by his owner as a gentle, loving cat — his 'anger' exists entirely in the eye of the camera.
🐱
2012–present
Think Think
The mud-caked stray kitten pulled from a Taiwanese disaster zone who grew up to become the presidential palace's beloved 'First Cat'.
Think Think is a grey tabby who rose from the most unpromising of beginnings to become one of Taiwan's most recognisable animals. In 2012 she was found as a skinny, mud-covered kitten with a skin condition in a landslide-hit area of Hualien on Taiwan's east coast, and was rescued and passed to the politician Tsai…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tsai Ing-wen is such a devoted cat lover that Think Think and her feline housemate Ah Tsai became social-media stars in their own right, helping to popularise the affectionate Mandarin idea of the doting 'cat servant'.
📚
2010–2025
Browser
The Texas library cat whose eviction by the city council sparked an international outcry — and a swift reversal that made him a resident for life.
Browser was an orange tabby who lived and worked at the public library in White Settlement, a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, after arriving as a shelter cat around 2010 to help with mice. For years he was a contented fixture among the bookshelves, greeting visitors and dozing in the sunshine, until in June 2016 he…
⭐ Fun Fact
After the international backlash, the mayor of White Settlement announced that Browser would be the town's official library cat for the rest of his life — a job he held until he died at the age of 15.
🐺
2014–present
Atchoum
The wild-haired Persian from Quebec whose rare 'werewolf syndrome' gave him a permanent case of dramatic bedhead and millions of online fans.
Atchoum is a golden Persian cat from Quebec, Canada, whose extraordinary appearance made him an internet sensation. His fur grows relentlessly in every direction, standing out from his face in a wild, windswept halo that has earned him affectionate comparisons to a tiny werewolf and a permanent look of startled…
⭐ Fun Fact
Atchoum's fur never stops growing, so grooming him is effectively a full-time job — the price of the perpetual 'just rolled out of bed' look that made him famous.
🚉
2018–present
Bolt
The energetic young apprentice to Felix, Huddersfield railway station's famous senior mouser, learning the ropes of platform life one commuter at a time.
When Felix the Huddersfield railway station cat became a national celebrity, complete with her own 'Senior Pest Controller' hi-vis and a bestselling book, the station team decided she could use some help. In 2018 a lively black-and-white kitten named Bolt arrived to become her apprentice, and the pairing quickly won…
⭐ Fun Fact
Bolt got his name from his boundless energy as a kitten — he would bolt up and down the platforms — a lively contrast to the unflappable, seen-it-all calm of his mentor Felix.
✈️
1982–1998
Norton
The globe-trotting Scottish Fold whose adventures with author Peter Gethers filled a trilogy of bestselling memoirs about a cat who went almost everywhere with him.
Norton was a grey Scottish Fold cat who became one of the most famous feline travellers in publishing history. His owner, the American author and editor Peter Gethers, had never considered himself a cat person until Norton arrived as a tiny kitten with the breed's characteristic folded-down ears — and utterly changed…
⭐ Fun Fact
Peter Gethers insisted he was not a cat person before Norton — the entire trilogy grew out of his astonishment at how completely one small, folded-eared kitten won him over and became his travelling companion.
🐾
c. 1930
Wong Mau
The small brown cat brought from Burma to San Francisco in 1930 who became the single foundation cat of the entire Burmese breed.
Wong Mau was a small, walnut-brown female cat brought from Burma to San Francisco around 1930 by Dr Joseph Cheesman Thompson, a retired US Navy physician with a keen interest in cats. Her rich, warm coat set her apart from the Siamese cats familiar in the West, and Thompson became convinced she represented a distinct…
⭐ Fun Fact
Genetic study of Wong Mau’s own coat revealed she was not a pure sable Burmese but a Burmese–Siamese hybrid — what breeders would later recognise as a Tonkinese — so a single cat effectively seeded two breeds.
🎂
1988–2015
Tiffany Two
The San Diego tortoiseshell who was recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest living cat, reaching the remarkable age of 27.
Tiffany Two was a tortoiseshell cat born in San Diego, California, in March 1988, who lived with her owner Sharon Voorhees for her entire, extraordinarily long life. In 2015 Guinness World Records recognised her as the oldest living cat in the world, by which point she was 27 years old — an age that, in rough human…
⭐ Fun Fact
Tiffany Two was born just a few years before the World Wide Web existed and lived to 27, meaning her life spanned the entire early history of the modern internet — an era her fellow record-breaking cats would come to dominate.
🎂
born 1995
Flossie
The British tortoiseshell rescued from a hospital cat colony who was confirmed by Guinness World Records in 2022 as the oldest living cat, at nearly 27.
Flossie is a British domestic shorthaired tortoiseshell cat born on 29 December 1995, whose extraordinarily long life was recognised in November 2022 when Guinness World Records confirmed her as the oldest living cat in the world. At the time of the record she was 26 years and 316 days old — the rough equivalent of…
⭐ Fun Fact
Guinness reckoned Flossie's age at roughly 120 in human years — meaning a cat born the year the first text message was sent went on to outlast entire generations of technology.
🎩
1939–present
Old Deuteronomy
The ancient, wise patriarch of the Jellicle cats from T. S. Eliot's poems and the musical Cats, said to have lived through countless lives.
Old Deuteronomy first padded into print in 1939, in T. S. Eliot's collection of light verse Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Among that book's gallery of feline characters he stands apart as the venerable elder: a cat of enormous age and dignity who is portrayed as having lived a great many lives and buried a long…
⭐ Fun Fact
In the 2019 film version Old Deuteronomy was played by Dame Judi Dench — who had been cast in the role for the original 1981 stage production decades earlier but had to withdraw after an injury before opening night.
🌌
1997
Orion
The unassuming tabby from Men in Black whose ordinary-looking collar bell secretly held an entire galaxy — making a house cat the object of a frantic intergalactic hunt.
In Barry Sonnenfeld's 1997 science-fiction comedy Men in Black, an entire alien war hinges on a small, placid tabby cat named Orion. Orion belongs to an Arquillian prince living on Earth in human disguise, and hidden on the little jewel that hangs from the cat's collar is 'the galaxy' — a whole miniaturised universe…
⭐ Fun Fact
The film's clue 'the galaxy is on Orion's belt' is a deliberate double meaning — everyone assumes it points to the constellation Orion, when it really means the collar around the neck of a cat named Orion.
🐱
2008–present
Buttercup
Prim's scruffy, ill-tempered pet cat in The Hunger Games — introduced as thoroughly unlovable, yet the animal through whom the trilogy delivers its final, quietest act of grief.
Buttercup is the household cat of the Everdeen family in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels, first published in 2008. Narrator Katniss makes no secret of her feelings on their first meeting: she describes him as an ugly, muddy-yellow tomcat with a squashed-in face, admits she tried to drown him as a kitten, and…
⭐ Fun Fact
Katniss opens the series admitting she once tried to drown Buttercup as a kitten — yet by the end of the trilogy he becomes the vehicle for its most heartbreaking moment of shared grief.
🚗
1989–1994
Toonces the Driving Cat
The Saturday Night Live sketch cat 'who could drive a car — just not very well', whose every trip ended with the vehicle sailing off a cliff.
Toonces the Driving Cat was a recurring sketch on the American comedy show Saturday Night Live, first appearing in 1989. The premise never changed and never needed to: Toonces is a family cat who, improbably, can get behind the wheel of a car and drive — 'a cat who could drive a car, just not very well.' Every sketch…
⭐ Fun Fact
Toonces almost always drove the car off a cliff — the crash was staged with a deliberately obvious toy car tumbling down a hill, a low-budget gag that became part of the sketch's charm.
🕵️
1965
DC
The Siamese sleuth of Disney's That Darn Cat! — a wandering house cat whose night-time roaming accidentally cracks a kidnapping case for the FBI.
DC — short simply for 'Darn Cat' — is the feline star of Walt Disney's 1965 comedy That Darn Cat!, based on the novel Undercover Cat. A confident, free-roaming Siamese, DC prowls his suburban neighbourhood each night, and on one such outing crosses paths with a kidnapped bank teller who manages to slip her wristwatch…
⭐ Fun Fact
DC's name is simply an abbreviation of 'Darn Cat', the exasperated nickname his owners give him — and Disney liked the character enough to remake the film in 1997.
How a cat becomes famous
Famous cats tend to reach the public eye through one of a few distinct routes — which is exactly how this page is categorised:
- Celebrity pets — cats owned by well-known people, sharing in their owner's spotlight.
- Political cats — official mousers and honorary mayors given titles by governments or communities.
- Internet famous — cats whose looks or antics went viral and became global memes.
- Historical & community heroes — ship's cats, wartime cats, and rescue cats whose deeds were recorded.
What unites them is a memorable story — and often a single striking photograph that the public never forgot.
Worked example: why Grumpy Cat went viral
From snapshot to global icon
Tardar Sauce — better known as Grumpy Cat — had feline dwarfism and an underbite, which gave her a permanently unimpressed expression.
In September 2012 a single photo of her face was posted online. It spread within days because it was instantly relatable: a perfect visual shorthand for a bad mood. That one image turned into internet fame, books, merchandise, and a film.
The pattern is typical of internet-famous cats: a distinctive, photogenic feature plus one well-timed image, amplified by millions of people who saw themselves in it.
Frequently asked questions about famous cats
Who is the most famous internet cat?
Grumpy Cat is among the most famous internet cats, known worldwide for her permanently grumpy expression caused by feline dwarfism. Maru, Lil Bub, and Nyan Cat are other internet feline icons.
Are there cats with official political jobs?
Yes. Larry the Cat is the official Chief Mouser to the UK Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street, and Stubbs the cat was the honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska for around 20 years.
What made Grumpy Cat famous?
Grumpy Cat, real name Tardar Sauce, went viral in 2012 after a photo of her unimpressed face spread online. Her distinctive look made her one of the most recognisable cats in the world.
Have cats ever been considered heroes?
Many cats are celebrated as heroes — ship's cats who controlled vermin, cats who alerted families to fires or carbon monoxide, and rescue cats whose stories inspired thousands of adoptions.