- Pal (dog actor)
Pal (
June 4 ,1940 - 1958), was a maleRough Collie . He was the first of a line of collies to portray the fictional female collieLassie . Pal was owned by animal trainers Frank andRudd Weatherwax .During the filming of the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film "Lassie Come Home ", the studios had decided to use a show collie trained byFrank Inn to portray the title character. However, a snap decision was made to take advantage of a massive flooding of theSacramento River in northernCalifornia in order to obtain some spectacular footage for the film. As the collie was still in training, MGM hired Pal as a stand-in for the river scene. Although the work was considered complicated for an animalactor , the dog performed exceptionally well. According to legend, after seeing the first prints, the head of MGM,Louis B. Mayer , stated that "Pal had entered the water, but Lassie had come out", and a new star was born.Pal died in 1958, but a long line of Pal's descendants have continued to portray Lassie, most recently in a 1994 update of the original film.
In 1945, Pal played Laddie in "
Son of Lassie ", and in 1949 played Lassie once more in "Challenge to Lassie ", an alternative adaptation of the bookGreyfriars Bobby , by Eleanor Atkinson. Pal also appeared in the two 1954 pilots ("The Inheritance" and "The Well") prepared for the CBS television series, "Lassie.References
External links
*imdb name|id=1306087|name=Pal
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