There was Cecil Hepworth’s dog Blair, who starred in Rescued by Rover (1905), a deceptively simple chase film that remains a landmark in film history and was so massively popular on its first release that it was remade twice, because the original negatives wore out.Īmerican studios followed Britain’s lead, first with a cunning border collie who was too big a star to remain “the Vitagraph dog” for long, eventually taking her proper billing as Jean in a string of adventure films.
And he joined a long line of great canine performances in silent movies. Don’t laugh – Uggie had just as many lines as his co-stars, after all. VanAirsdale’s “Consider Uggie” campaign, which may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek (“Intertitles! Schmintertitles!”), neglected to mention whether it was taking aim at the best or supporting actor nomination. In the end Uggie had to settle for reflected glory from the big Oscar and Bafta wins, and his own Palm Dog trophy awarded at the Cannes film festival.
When awards season came around, the film journalist ST VanAirsdale campaigned to get Uggie a nomination for an Oscar, noting quite rightly that “from his connection to his master to his lingering close-ups and beyond, Uggie is director Michel Hazanavicius’s purest model of physical expression”. By the end of the sequence, he has top billing with his owner George – even in the world of the movie, he’s a star. One of my favourite blink-and-you’d-miss-it gags in The Artist is when, during a montage of credit sequences, you see Uggie is miscredited as Uggy. To mangle a line first used about Ginger Rogers, Uggie did everything Dujardin did, but backwards and on four legs. At the end of The Artist, it’s dancing that saves our hero from obsolescence, and we have seen him practising his synchronised moves not just with his leading lady but with his dog Uggie, who matches him step-for-step throughout the film. He looked more than a little like Skippy, the nimble wire fox terrier who scampered around 1930s films including The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby, but was best known for playing Asta in the Thin Man movies. Uggie brought a sparkle of Golden Age Hollywood with him, which was perfect for The Artist.
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