Olga Celeste

Olga Celeste (April 9, 1888 – August 31, 1969) trained leopards and pumas for performance in circuses, vaudeville and film. She starred in very early animal films for Selig Polyscope, and was said (perhaps hyperbolically) to have handled animals for 1,000 films, including Nissa the leopard in the Katharine Hepburn film Bringing Up Baby. According to the Los Angeles Times she ran away at 11 to join a Swedish circus, but eventually returned home. Another report said that she ran away to train horses and after several days her parents found her living in barn and sleeping in a manger. She reportedly told an interviewer that "her father sold her horse to the Circus Madigan; right then, she wanted 'to run away from home, join the circus and be with her horse'."

Per a 2020 Swedish-language profile of Olga Celeste, "As a 16-year-old, she had left her parents' home outside Lund in Skåne, at night, to take the and make her dreams come true. Olga was the youngest of seven siblings and the only naughty one. Her older sisters and brothers were all well-behaved and disappeared through life and into their coffins without anyone taking much notice of them." One 16-year-old Olga Cecelia Knutson of Lund, Skåne Län departed Malmö for Chicago on April 15, 1904. She took the ship from Liverpool to Boston, arriving April 30; her contact in the U.S. was her sister Edith Knutson of Chicago. According to Frank Buck, Princess Celeste ran away at age 14 or 15 to join a circus operating in Chicago's Riverview Park. The Riverview Park bit may may be roughly correct; somewhere along the way she apparently encountered Essie Fay, a "famous equestrian who worked with sixty-three horses in an act for the Walter L. Main Circus," and was inspired to follow her dreams into circus life.

Early career Her start in show business supposedly came in 1904 when she lived with her older sister in Chicago. Around 1908, she appeared opposite Charles B. Murphy in a motion picture short called The Lion's Bride. It was reportedly premiered in Riverview Park and caused a sensation. Murphy and Olga Celeste were married around 1910 but later divorced; the couple had no children. She was occasionally credited as Olga Celeste Murphy during the teens. Olga Celeste also starred in Selig's 1909 (directed by Francis Boggs), and worked as a stunt double for Kathlyn Williams in Selig's groundbreaking serial The Adventures of Kathlyn.

Mlle. Olga Celeste and Her Trained Leopards to appear at the Jefferson County Fair in Fairfield, Iowa, August 12–13, 1920 Employed by the Luna Park Zoo in Los Angeles, Celeste worked with and trained a handful of leopards and hosted leopard tea parties on Sundays. In 1923 Mlle. Celeste took her leopard act to Aloha Park in Hawaii. Following the success of a hit 1933 Clyde Beatty picture, she was hired to appear as one of the trainers in Taming the Jungle.

Nissa the Leopard When director Howard Hawks could not find a panther that would work for the 1938 film, Bringing Up Baby, Baby was changed to a leopard so they could cast the trained leopard Nissa, who had worked in the industry for eight years, making several B-movies.

Both the leopards in the story were played by Nissa, supervised by Celeste, who stood by with a whip during shooting. Celeste worked with and trained several leopards but her favorite was Nissa, whom she considered nothing more than a large house cat. Because Nissa was such a joy to have around, Celeste often took her home with her after a long day on the set.

Katharine Hepburn and Nissa in a publicity photo; at one point, Nissa lunged at Hepburn but was stopped by the trainer's whip.

Sweet and docile for the most part, Nissa did have a precocious side. As a lover of perfume Nissa was soothed, comforted and drawn to anything that smelled fragrant, so Olga used perfume as her main training technique. The very first scene shot for the movie featured Hepburn walking around her bedroom and talking on the phone wearing a gorgeous floating dressing gown. Perfume was sprinkled on the cloth near Hepburn’s knee so that Nissa in the scene would rub up against Hepburn’s leg in affectionate greeting. There were several news reports about Hawks's difficulty filming the live leopard, and the potential danger to highly valuable actors, so some scenes required rear-screen projection.

Later career and death When the Luna Park Zoo shut down in 1940 she was the last original employee of what had once been Selig's Wild Animal Farm, and she borrowed money (including, reportedly, from friends like boxer Jack Dempsey and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller) She was survived by nieces and nephews in the American Midwest and Sweden. Olga Celeste rarely, if ever, used her legal last name Knutson.