Jonesy

Jonesy — sometimes written 'Jones' — is the ginger tomcat aboard the commercial spaceship Nostromo in Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction classic 'Alien'. Kept as the ship's cat, Jonesy spends the film wandering the vessel's shadowy corridors, and more than once his sudden appearances are used to ratchet up the tension, standing in for the far deadlier creature stalking the crew.

Against the odds, Jonesy becomes one of only two survivors of the film, alongside the heroine Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. In the film's closing moments Ripley carefully tucks the cat into a hypersleep capsule before entering her own, and the pair drift off into space together — a small note of warmth at the end of a relentlessly frightening story.

The cat went on to appear briefly at the start of the 1986 sequel 'Aliens'. Jonesy's role as the calm, surviving companion amid the horror has made him one of the best-remembered animal characters in science-fiction cinema, and a favourite example of the long tradition of ships — real and fictional — carrying a cat aboard.