Thomas O'Malley

Abraham de Lacy Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley — a name he delivers in full, and with considerable relish — is the ginger alley cat at the centre of Disney's 1970 animated feature 'The Aristocats'. Voiced by Phil Harris, who had already given Disney the bear Baloo two years earlier, O'Malley is the streetwise counterweight to a household of pampered Parisian pedigrees.

The plot turns on a butler who abducts a wealthy widow's cats to remove them from her will and abandons them in the French countryside. O'Malley finds the stranded Duchess and her three kittens and escorts them back to Paris, and the film is essentially a road movie in which an alley cat teaches a duchess's family how the world actually works while falling for her along the way.

The character sits in a long tradition of Disney rogues with hearts of gold, but he is unusually relaxed about it — O'Malley is never reformed, never domesticated, and the film is quite clear that his freedom is a virtue rather than a deficiency. His musical number, performed with a troupe of jazz-playing alley cats, is the sequence most people remember, and the film's affection for improvised, slightly shabby street life gives it a warmth that a story about wealthy cats might otherwise have lacked.

'The Aristocats' was the last animated feature approved by Walt Disney himself before his death, and it remains one of the studio's most cat-centred films.