Most faithfully, Rin Tin Tin

The credit read 'Played by himself', and the fan mail was answered by a paw. Rin Tin Tin was found in a French field in September 1918 by Lee Duncan, an American soldier, and came home with him; the dog got his first film work in 1922, when a director needed something more reliable than a camera-shy wolf in The Man from Hell's River, and his first starring role - Where the North Begins, opposite Claire Adams in 1923 - made him a star. A dog who could not read received the mail of a matinee idol, by the thousands of letters a week, and the reply was manufactured exactly the way a human star's would have been: a glossy portrait, signed with an inked paw print, over the line Duncan wrote for him - 'Most faithfully, Rin Tin Tin'. The studio leaned on him whenever it got into trouble, and the films were known inside the trade as the mortgage lifters; by 1927 the most sophisticated film audience in Europe had made him the most popular actor in Berlin. The audience knew perfectly well he was a dog, and that was the condition of the whole thing. The one performer in this corpus who ever came physically close to answering back was the one who could not possibly understand what he was being addressed for, and the attachment has outlived him by a century of dog after dog. Two honesty notes belong here. The sources disagree on the count of his films - the New Yorker gives twenty-three silent pictures, Wikipedia twenty-seven Hollywood films - and the battlefield rescue is Duncan's own story, retold with variations ever since.