Purr-fect casting: is Orangey the most important movie cat ever?

A new retrospective celebrates the work of the cat credited with roles in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Comedy of Terrors and Rhubarb In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres. Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his mo...

Actor Bel Powley: ‘I’d shied away from second world war stories – it’s always all about men’

The Morning Show star on playing the woman who hid Anne Frank, ​revitalising period dramas and working with her teenage heroes Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon

Isobel “Bel” Powley, 31, was born in west London. In 2016 she was Bafta-nominated for The Diary of a Teenage Girl and shortlisted for a British independent film award for playing Princess Margaret in A Royal Night Out. Subsequent film roles include The King of Staten Island and Mary Shelley, where she met her fiance, actor Douglas Booth. On TV, she’s starred in The Morning Show and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love. She now plays Hermine “Miep” Gies in miniseries A Small Light, based on the true story of the young woman who hid the Frank family during the second world war and preserved Anne’s diary.

Were you familiar with Miep Gies’s story?
I’d read Anne Frank’s diary as a kid, and I’m Jewish myself, so you grow up with this weight of history running through your family, but I knew nothing about Miep Gies. I was offered the role on Holocaust Memorial Day, which felt kind of special, but was genuinely like: Who is that? Nor did I know about the occupation of the Netherlands and the Dutch resistance. The first thing I did was get my butt over to Amsterdam. It’s a city that operates in a very specific way – everyone cycles everywhere, it’s built on waterways – so I immersed myself in how it feels to live there. I visited the Anne Frank museum, obviously, but also went to Miep’s old apartment and cycled the same routes as her. That was my springboard for working on this.

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