Bart the Bear

Bart the Bear was a male Kodiak bear who worked as an animal actor, born at the Baltimore Zoo and trained by Doug and Lynne Seus of Wasatch Rocky Mountain Wildlife in Utah. He made his screen debut in Windwalker (1980) and went on to appear in White Fang (1991), Legends of the Fall, and The Edge (1997), the last two alongside Anthony Hopkins. His best known role came in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Bear (1988), in which he played an adult grizzly who takes in an orphaned cub; Annaud cast him after auditioning fifty bears from around the world. Kenneth Turan called his performance in The Edge the capstone of his career, and The Bear was a hit in Europe and the United States, reportedly prompting a campaign for an Academy Award nomination. In 1998 he took part in a salute to animal actors at the Academy Awards.