Cat Stories
Cat Stories
Musicians
12 articlesTaylor Swift's three cats
The two Scottish Folds and the Ragdoll who have shown up in Taylor Swift's music videos, album sessions, and documentaries. Verifiable facts, correct breeds, and the welfare debate over Scottish Fold breeding.
Paul McCartney and Pyewacket, the black cat of Cavendish Avenue
Pyewacket, a black domestic shorthair, lived in the St. John's Wood house Paul McCartney bought in 1965. Her name came from a 1958 film, and Linda McCartney photographed her for years.
Musicians and their cats
From Freddie Mercury to Taylor Swift, with Lennon at the Dakota and Bowie in Berlin in between: the cats that have shared a home with the most recognizable faces in pop and rock. Breeds, verifiable sources, and the patterns that repeat across a century of music.
Kurt Cobain and Lily, the black-and-white cat from Aberdeen
Before Nirvana, before Bleach, Kurt Cobain shared his Aberdeen, Washington bedroom with a black-and-white cat named Lily, documented in private family photographs published after 1994.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Lennon lived with cats from his Liverpool childhood onward. When he settled into the Dakota Building in New York with Yoko Ono, the apartment housed at least five cats whose routine is recorded in biographies, in Bob Gruen's photographs, and in Yoko's own memoir.
Halsey, Wolfie, and the cats of the Calabasas house
Halsey has talked about several cats in interviews and on social media. Wolfie, a brown tabby, has been the most documented. The singer has tied the feline presence in her home to her public discourse on mental health.
Freddie Mercury and his cats
The documented relationship between Freddie Mercury and the ten cats who lived with him at Garden Lodge. Who they were, what breed each one was, the Queen song Delilah, and the legacy that passed to Mary Austin.
Florence Welch and her black cats
The Florence + The Machine singer shares her home with rescued black cats and folds them into the band's visual identity. The gothic-Victorian symbolism her music cites runs through the Camberwell house too.
Ed Sheeran's cats Calippo and Dorito
Ed Sheeran has lived with Calippo and Dorito, two cats adopted from a Suffolk shelter, since 2014. They have their own Instagram account and appear in his 2018 documentary Songwriter.
Billie Eilish and Misha, the black cat who flies on her private jet
Billie Eilish adopted Misha in 2018 as she was breaking out of Los Angeles. She called him 'the love of my life' and brings him on tour, documented in her Apple TV+ film.
Freddie Mercury and Delilah
Freddie Mercury lived with multiple cats throughout his life and famously dedicated a song to one of them. The story of Delilah, the tortoiseshell who appeared in his final years and inspired a track on Innuendo, the Queen's last studio album with Mercury.
Ariana Grande's rescue cats
Ariana Grande lives with multiple rescue cats alongside her rescue dogs. The pattern of her adoptions, the species and ages, and what her advocacy has changed in the public conversation about cat rescue in the US.
Actors & TV
7 articlesCat breeds in film and TV
Orangey in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Jonesy in Alien, Mr. Bigglesworth in Austin Powers, Goose in Captain Marvel. Why casting directors favor the red tabby, which breeds dominated Hollywood, and which cases are verifiable.
Marlon Brando and the unscripted cat that opened The Godfather
The opening scene of The Godfather (1972) shows Don Vito Corleone stroking a calico cat that was never in the script. She was a stray hanging around the set. Brando scooped her up mid-take, the camera kept rolling, and the cat walked off with a piece of the movie.
Marilyn Monroe and Mitsou
In 1957, newly pregnant and just settled into her Sutton Place apartment, Marilyn Monroe lived with a white Persian cat named Mitsou. The cat is documented in biographies and in a photo session by Sam Shaw.
James Dean and Marcus
In September 1955, Elizabeth Taylor gave James Dean a Siamese kitten named Marcus. The last thing the actor wrote by hand was a recipe for kitten formula.
Brigitte Bardot and the cats of La Madrague
After leaving film in 1973, Brigitte Bardot turned her Saint-Tropez villa La Madrague into a feline sanctuary. Her foundation has run the rescued-cat population there since 1986, with strict spay/neuter and veterinary policy decades ahead of French law.
Actors and their cats
From Marilyn Monroe's white Persian to the stray that wandered onto the set of The Godfather, and from James Dean's Siamese to the rescue cats of Ian Somerhalder and Norman Reedus: the cats that shared their lives with film and television's most famous faces, separating the documented from the apocryphal.
Vivien Leigh and Boy, the Siamese who slept on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire
During the 1950 shoot of A Streetcar Named Desire, Vivien Leigh brought Boy, her Siamese cat, to the set. He was a steady anchor through her bipolar crises and a documented fixture of Hollywood's golden age.
Athletes
1 articlesWriters
5 articlesMark Twain and Bambino
In April 1905, Samuel Clemens ran a New York Herald ad offering five dollars for the return of his black cat. What happened over the next seventy-two hours was not in the script.
Edgar Allan Poe and Catterina
Catterina, Edgar Allan Poe's tortoiseshell cat, slept on Virginia Clemm's chest through the final months of her tuberculosis in the Fordham cottage. Her story survives in a letter from Marie Louise Shew.
Colette, the French writer who turned her Chartreux cats into literature
French writer Colette spent her life surrounded by cats. Her real Chartreux, called simply La Chatte, inspired Saha, the feline lead of her 1933 novel. Here is what can be verified about her cats and her books.
T. S. Eliot and the real cats behind Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
T. S. Eliot's cat book, published in 1939, grew out of private letters to the children of his Faber colleagues. Macavity, Mungojerrie, and the rest were real cats before they were musical characters.
Hemingway's polydactyl cats at Key West
Ernest Hemingway received a polydactyl kitten from a ship captain in 1935. Nearly a century later, the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West houses 60+ descendants, half of them six-toed. The genetics, the cultural history, and what it tells us about cat populations.
Historical Figures
5 articlesHistorical figures and their cats
Hemingway with his Key West polydactyls, Twain with Bambino, Poe with Catterina, Churchill with Jock, Richelieu with his fourteen cats. The list of historical figures with a documented cat is long and, in some cases, it changes how we read the biography.
Florence Nightingale and the 60 cats she kept across her lifetime
The founder of modern nursing lived with more than sixty cats over her lifetime. She kept written records of each one's temperament. Her letters to family mention Persians, blue shorthairs, and ordinary tabbies, and make clear what she thought of them next to people.
Cardinal Richelieu and his fourteen cats
Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, kept fourteen named cats in the Palais Cardinal, assigned two servants to their care, and provided for them in his 1642 will.
Winston Churchill and Jock, the ginger cat written into the will of Chartwell
In 1962, John Colville gave Churchill a ginger cat with white feet and a white bib named Jock. The former prime minister's wishes turned the presence of a cat like that at Chartwell into a permanent condition, kept by the National Trust to this day.
Theodore Roosevelt and Slippers
December 1906, the White House. Slippers, a gray polydactyl cat with six toes on each front paw, falls asleep in the middle of the rug during a diplomatic reception and forces ambassadors and their wives to walk around him. Roosevelt lets it happen.
Artists
4 articlesSalvador Dalí and Babou, the ocelot he walked through New York like a house cat
Babou was no house cat. He was an ocelot, a wild South American feline. Salvador Dalí walked him through New York and Paris on a jeweled collar and let him drink from restaurant glasses. The animal, the legend, and why no one could keep a Babou today.
Louis Wain and Peter
In 1884, Emily Richardson brought home a black-and-white cat named Peter. Her husband Louis Wain drew him until the cat became a Victorian icon and the founding template for the anthropomorphic cat in popular culture.
Karl Lagerfeld and Choupette
Choupette arrived at Karl Lagerfeld's Paris home in December 2011 as a holiday favor. She ended up with two full-time keepers, nine million followers, her own commercial income, and a media legacy from the designer himself.
Andy Warhol's twenty-five Sams
Before the Campbell's soup cans, Andy Warhol self-published a small book of lithographs about his cats. The house on Lexington Avenue held more than twenty of them, almost all named Sam.
Politicians
2 articlesCalvin Coolidge and Tiger
In October 1924, Tiger, the gray tabby of the White House, slipped out a side door. President Coolidge put out a call for help over the radio, in one of the first broadcasts to reach a national audience. A week later, Tiger turned up walking along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Abraham Lincoln and Tabby
In 1861, Secretary of State William Seward gave the newly inaugurated president two tabby kittens. One was named Tabby. Lincoln fed him with a fork at official dinners, to the dismay of Mary Todd and half the cabinet.
Guides
1 articlesNames
1 articlesComplete guide
Cat Names: How to Choose the Best One (and the Most Popular in 2026)
It may look like your cat ignores its name, but research has shown it can tell its name from other words. How to pick one your cat learns fast, the mistakes to avoid, and a broad list of popular cat names in the US in 2026.