Grizabella 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 The character of Grizabella featured in an unpublished poem that T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren, intending to include it in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats".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
Possum (2018 film) Hailstone came up with the idea of having the character's face be inexpressive in which the audience could project their own fears onto it. Hailstone then sculpted the "Possum"'s face, which was made to resemble Harris' character, in three to four hours, with Holness approving the final design. The film's reasonably low budget and tight production schedule limited the amount of time that the studio could spend on designing and constructing the character. The head, neck, and body of the "Possum" was constructed as a simple hand puppet, with the body constructed out of foam latex and the head made