Beerbohm

Beerbohm was the resident cat of the Gielgud Theatre in London's West End — born in the building when it was still called the Globe, and named after the celebrated Victorian actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. For more than two decades he had the run of one of London's grandest theatres, and he made the most of it.

He became famous for behaving exactly as a theatre cat should not. He attacked the props, wandered in and out of the actors' dressing rooms as he pleased, and — most memorably — had a habit of strolling nonchalantly across the stage in the middle of a performance. He first caught the public's attention doing precisely that during a 1978 show by the drag musical act Hinge and Bracket, and he happily repeated the trick throughout his life, quite unbothered by the audience or the actors whose scenes he was stealing.

Beerbohm was, by tradition, one of a line of West End theatre cats kept partly to control mice and partly because a theatre without a cat was considered unlucky. A portrait of him hung in the theatre for years. He retired in 1991 to live with the theatre's master carpenter in Beckenham, and when he died in March 1995 his passing was reported across the national press — making him the first, and so far only, cat to receive a front-page obituary in the theatre newspaper The Stage.