Tinseltown is ready for its biggest night of the year. The motion picture industry will once again celebrate itself with glitz, gowns, and golden statuettes. But one group of screen stars won’t be receiving any Oscars.
No animal has ever won an Academy Award. The rules don’t expressly prohibit them from consideration, though in the strictest definition “actor” and “actress” imply human nominees. That’s why we’ve never seen an animal recipient bark, whinny, or squawk their acceptance speech at the podium.
Which is a shame, because one animal deserved the honor above all others. Forget Lassie, skip Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger, and don’t bother with King Kong. I’m talking about Jimmy the Raven.
Jimmy shared the screen with some of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and even Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
Remember the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where a crow lands on the Scarecrow’s shoulder? That was Jimmy. Or how about the bird that perched on Uncle Billy’s finger in “It’s a Wonderful Life”? Again, Jimmy. Even the ominous black bird in the dark comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace” was Jimmy, too. In fact, he was seen in hundreds of feature films, far more than any human actor can boast.
It all started with the 1938 comedy classic “You Can’t Take It with You.” Director Frank Capra wanted a bird for the kooky Vanderhof family’s home. Jimmy did such a great job, Capra kept using him. Thus a lengthy cinematic career was born.
Jimmy’s story began on a less-than-glamorous note. Animal trainer Curly Twiford was hiking through the Mojave Desert one day in 1934. He came upon a deserted raven’s nest with a chick inside. Twiford took the baby bird home, named him Jimmy, and raised him in his house. As Jimmy grew, his exceptional intelligence quickly became apparent. Twiford soon had him typing, dropping coins into a piggy bank, lighting cigarettes, riding a tiny motorcycle, and performing many other tricks.
He was said to have a vocabulary of several hundred words, though Twiford always pointed out only 50 or so were “useful.” He could learn a new word in a week (two weeks if it had two syllables) and reportedly had the intelligence of an 8-year-old child.
Visiting the Twiford home must have been an experience because it hosted quite a menagerie, including a raccoon, a rat, canaries, parrots, and various other critters.
But it was Jimmy who stole the show. He eventually became so popular he was featured by name in movie credits, although sometimes he was billed as “Jimmy the Crow” when that avian variety was needed. In fact, MGM even insured him for $10,000 as a publicity stunt.
Jimmy the Raven was no birdbrain. Jimmy Stewart noted that whenever someone called “Jimmy!” during filming of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the human and the bird both answered. He also called the raven “the smartest actor on the set,” who required fewer retakes than the rest of the cast.
His last movie was 1954’s “3 Ring Circus,” after which he seems to have retired. Twiford died in 1956; nobody knows what happened to the bird after that.
As I wrote at the beginning, Academy Awards aren’t given to animal performers. But while Jimmy never got to go home with Oscar, he did fly off with movie lovers’ hearts.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
