Irena Dubrovna-Reed
Irena is a fashion designer new to New York from her native Serbian town which has a lurid history of witchcraft, devil-worship and women turning into cats. She doing sketches at the Central Park Zoo when she first meets Oliver Reed whom she will later marry. The failure consummate that marriage due to Irena’s insistence that doing so will be the stimulus bringing on her transformation into a cat person. As the film progresses, it appears to be more and more evident that Irena’s growing jealousy toward the deepening relationship between her husband and his formerly platonic friend—and future wife in the sequel—Alice.
Oliver Reed
The climax of the film commences with a shadowy display of Christian iconography as a means of combatting the evil lurking inside Irena. The figure of a cross is not made with crucifix, but with a large T-square engineering tool. Which goes a long way toward explaining why the central male character in the film has a job not shared by many leading male characters: engineering draughtsman.
Alice Moore
Described by her future husband Oliver as “the girl who works in our department” turns out to be far more than that. After all, it is Alice—and not Oliver—who is the real catalyst for Irena’s transformation into a cat. More specifically, it is Irena’s slowly boiling but ultimately raging jealousy toward Alice that stimulates the violent confrontations.
Dr. Louis Judd
Dr. Louis Judd is a friend of Alice Moore whom she advises to Oliver as possibly being able to assist with Irena’s bizarre refusal to engage in a sexual relationship with her husband. Dr. Judd tries and almost succeeds in convincing Irena that her fears of transforming into one of the “cat people” is entirely psychological in basis. Unfortunately for him, he learns the hard way that this is not necessarily so when he tries to force his own sexual desire upon Irena.
