Old Deuteronomy

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 line of wives, and who is treated with deep respect by the village and by the other cats around him. Where Eliot's other cats are mischievous, theatrical or criminal, Old Deuteronomy is the still, wise centre of the collection.

He found far wider fame four decades later when Andrew Lloyd Webber set Eliot's poems to music in the 1981 stage musical Cats, one of the longest-running shows in the history of both the West End and Broadway. On stage Old Deuteronomy is the revered patriarch who presides over the Jellicle Ball, the yearly gathering at which he alone chooses which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn into a new life. That role makes him the calm moral heart of the show around which its spectacle revolves.

The character has since been played by a string of notable performers, and in the 2019 film adaptation Old Deuteronomy was reimagined as female and portrayed by Dame Judi Dench. Between Eliot's original verse and the global reach of the musical, Old Deuteronomy has become one of the most recognisable fictional cats in the English-speaking world — a symbol of wisdom, longevity and gentle authority whenever cats are given a leader.