Grizabella

Grizabella is the "Glamour Cat" in the musical production Cats. She does not appear in T. S. Eliot's work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, but she is a prominent character in the stageplay. It appears that she is the feline version of the woman mentioned in T.S. Eliot's poem "Rhapsody on a Windy Night".

"Remark the cat
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her coat
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The character of Grizabella featured in an unpublished poem that T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren, intending to include it in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. However, as his widow, Valerie Eliot pointed out, he thought it was too "sad for children" and so did not include it in the finished work. Valerie Eliot came to the 1980 Sydmonton Festival concert where Andrew Lloyd Webber premiered some of his settings of the Old Possum poems, and gave him the paper with the fragment of Grizabella written on it. From there Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn incorporated the Grizabella poem as a main strand of the plot of the show. Grizabella is the main singer in 'memory'.