By DAVE ITZKOFF (New York Times)

An animal sanctuary in Florida has announced the death of a chimpanzee it says was Cheetah, one of the most famous animal stars of the 1930s, who appeared with Johnny Weissmuller in Depression-era adventure films like “Tarzan the Ape Man” and “Tarzan and His Mate.” But the announcement drew skepticism and recalled a previous incident of mistaken chimpanzee identity.

Debbie Cobb, the outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Fla., where this chimpanzee lived, told The Tampa Tribune that he was about 80 years old and died Saturday of kidney failure.

In the Tarzan film series, whose golden age spanned 1932 to 1948, Cheetah (sometimes spelled without the “h”), was a comic and sympathetic sidekick whose intelligence sometimes seemed to rival that of his human co-stars like Weissmuller (who played the titular jungle lord) and Maureen O’Sullivan (who portrayed his civilized love interest, Jane). The sanctuary said it believed that its Cheetah appeared in the films made between 1932 and 1934.

Ms. Cobb told The Tribune that the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary received Cheetah from Weissmuller’s estate in Ocala, Fla., around 1960. Of the 15 chimpanzees kept at the sanctuary, she said Cheetah was the most famous and an outgoing ape with a gentle personality who had long outlived the 35 to 45 years that chimpanzees typically survive in captivity.

“He was very compassionate,” Ms. Cobb said. “He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings.”

She said Cheetah was soothed by Christian music and also enjoyed finger painting and watching football, though she was unsure if he had any favorite teams.

“I couldn’t ask him that,” Ms. Cobb told The Tribune. “I’m not a chimp psychic.” The sanctuary did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Dr. Steve Ross, assistant director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, said he found it “very improbable” that a chimpanzee who appeared in films in the 1930s would still be alive in 2011.

“To live into your 70s is really pushing the limits of chimp biology,” Dr. Ross said in a telephone interview. “Eighty is tough to swallow.”

Referring to records kept by the center and dating to 1901, Dr. Ross said that the oldest surviving chimpanzee he was aware of is a female named Little Mama, now living at the Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, Fla., and whose age is “in the range of 72, 73,” he said. “But even that I would always say is plus or minus 10 years, because the records from that far back are always very sketchy.”

The oldest male chimp, Dr. Ross said, is Keo, who lives at the Lincoln Park Zoo and is about to turn 53. “Animals that live into their 40s are definitely considered elderly by most any standards,” he said.

Though Dr. Ross said he would like to study the life spans of chimpanzees that work in films and compare them to their relatives in the wild, the necessary data is not easy to come by.

“I’ve spent a couple years now trying to track down some of these chimps,” he said, “and it more often than not leads to a dead end.”

Agence France-Presse reported a previous instance in which the owners of a chimpanzee named Cheeta believed that their ape had appeared in the classic “Tarzan” films but later learned that Cheeta was younger than they thought. “It is also difficult to determine which movies, if any, our Cheeta may have been in,” these owners wrote on their Web site.

In a post on her Twitter account Mia Farrow, who is O’Sullivan’s daughter, wrote: “Cheetah the chimp in Tarzan movies died this week at 80. My mom, who played Jane, invariably referred to Cheetah as ‘that bastard.’ ” In a later post she added that “he bit her at every opportunity.”

Eve Golden, an archivist at the Everett Collection, which owns images from many films including the Tarzan movies, said it was nearly impossible to identify a chimpanzee as Cheetah by comparing him to old movie stills. “All chimps basically look like George Burns to me,” she said.

Source: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/cheetah-chimpanzee-in-tarzan-movies-has-died/?scp=2&sq=cheetah&st=cse