The Ultimate Movie Dog: All About Skippy, the Pup Who Charmed Audiences in Classic ’30s Films

In the Golden Age of ’30s Hollywood, an adorable dog named Skippy emerged as an A-lister. The talented, expressive Wire Fox Terrier acted alongside icons like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and stole the show in more than 20 films of the era. It’s rare that a dog becomes a movie star, but Skippy made his cinematic mark in a big way, and many decades later he remains beloved by cinephiles of all ages.

Here’s the story of how Skippy went from unknown canine to surprising screwball comedy mainstay.

From Skippy to Asta

Skippy was born in 1931 and owned by silent film actress Gale Henry and her husband, Henry East. The couple began training dogs for movies in 1923 (that’s right, people have loved watching onscreen pups for over 100 years!) and they established a Hollywood kennel devoted to turning dogs into movie stars.

Henry and East already had a good deal of experience training dogs when they got Skippy, and they instantly recognized that he was special. They started training him when he was just a puppy, and he showed great intelligence, flawlessly responding to both verbal and visual commands.

Soon enough, Skippy made his screen debut with an uncredited bit part in the 1932 film The Half-Naked Truth, and two years later, he became an overnight sensation when he was cast as the pet dog of the witty crime-solving couple Nick and Nora Charles (played by William Powell and Myrna Loy) in The Thin Man. The 1934 comedy became a big hit, as audiences loved the banter between Nick and Nora and delighted in Skippy’s role as their trusty pooch, Asta.

The Thin Man spawned one of the great movie franchises of its day and Asta was key to its success, since Skippy was capable of conveying emotion and playing off charismatic stars like no other dog before or since. Skippy reprised his signature role in two more Thin Man films, After the Thin Man (1936) and Another Thin Man (1939) and even received his own credit as Asta.

Asta wasn’t just cute, he also helped Nick and Nora solve crimes, and he was singlehandedly (or shall we saw singlepawedly?) responsible for making Wire Fox Terriers one of the most popular dog breeds of the era. While Skippy infamously bit Loy during the filming of The Thin Man, and actors weren’t allowed to interact with him outside of filming, he was for the most part as professional as a dog could be, and earned $250 a week (equivalent to around $5,000 today) for his talents.

Skippy was such a celebrity that he was profiled in movie magazines, and in one of these contemporary features, which described him as “one of the smartest dogs in the world,” Gale Henry claimed that the trick to getting him to act was simple, saying, “Treat a dog kindly and he’ll do anything in the world for you.”

Skippy’s other roles as a screwball pup

Skippy, who passed away in 1951, will always be best known as Asta from The Thin Man, but he continued to have plum roles in classic comedies like The Awful Truth (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938)—that’s right, this little terrier acted opposite none other than Cary Grant in not one but two films. In The Awful Truth, Skippy had a particularly pivotal role, as he played Mr. Smith, a dog at the center of a custody dispute in a divorce.

It’s rare that anyone can steal a scene from Grant, let alone a non-human, but Skippy did just that, and his perky presence and expert comic timing made him one of the most talented dogs of all time.