The stars who steal the show

For every equine movie blockbuster, there's a host of talented, superbly trained and biddable horses that produce the magic. Bernard Bale uncovers the equine actors who deserve their place in the spotlight

- Bernard Bale

FILM and TV stars are told never to work with children or animals, yet often it is those animals and especially those horses that have helped propel those actors and actresses into being well-known stars.

We are talking about those four-legged legends of the screen whom we know and love, even years after their burst of stardom. Remember My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty and Champion the Wonder Horse? Gone but definitely not forgotten...

MY Friend Flicka was an enormous TV success in the 1950s, where it was shown in black and white for the benefit of home television sets at the time, although created in colour. Flicka was a mustang who mostly took a walk on the wild side, but befriended a girl named Kate in the original Mary O'Hara book. For TV, Kate became Ken and later when Disney brought the story back to life, it was with Kate once again as Flicka's best pal.

Of course, the adventures were varied, sometimes fun, sometimes hoof-biting, but they were always compulsive and everyone fell in love with the star of the show - Flicka, who was played by various horses, possibly the most famous being Wahana, a pure-bred Arab impersonating a fairly wild mustang and doing so with honours. All the horses through the years were trained to fulfil the script rather than the script being written to complement the natural talents of the horses.