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Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 - December 15, 1966) is famous for his influence in the field of entertainment during the twentieth century. The corporation he co-founded with his brother, Roy, now The Walt Disney Company, became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world and today has annual revenues of approximately U.S. $35 billion.
Disney is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created a number of the world's most famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse. He received fifty-nine Academy Award nominations and won twenty-six Oscars, including a record four in one year, and thus holds the record for the individual with the most awards and the most nominations. He also won seven Emmy Awards. He is the namesake for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the United States, Japan, France, and China.
Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, a few years prior to the opening of his Walt Disney World Resort dream project in Florida.
Childhood
Walt Disney was born to Elias Disney an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, who was of German-American descent. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1890, where his brother Robert lived. For most of his early life, Robert helped Elias financially. In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Missouri. Here Disney developed his love for drawing. After 4 years the Disney's moved to Kansas City in 1911
Teenage years
1917: Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and began taking night courses at the Chicago Art Institute. Disney became the cartoonist for the school newspaper. His cartoons were very patriotic, focusing on World War I. Disney dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to join the Army, but the army rejected him because he was underage. He joined The Red Cross, and soon after was sent to France for a year, where he drove an ambulance.
1919: After considering becoming an actor or a newspaper artist, he decided he wanted to create a career in the newspaper, drawing political caricatures or comic strips. But when nobody wanted to hire him as either an artist or even as an ambulance driver, his brother Roy, who worked at a bank in the area, got a temporarily job for him at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio through a bank colleague. Here Disney created ads for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. It was here that he met a cartoonist named Ubbe Iwerks. When their time at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio expired and their both were without a job, they decided to start their own commercial company.
1920: Disney and Iwerks formed a short-lived company called, "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". Disney took up an interest in the field of animation, and decided to become an animator. He was allowed by the owner of the Ad Company, A.V. Cauger, to borrow a camera from work, which he could use to experiment with at home. After reading a book by Edwin G. Lutz, called Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, he found cell animation to be much more promising than the cutout animation he was doing for Cauger. Walt eventually decided to open his own animation business, and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Kansas City Film Ad Company,.
Laugh O' Gram Studio
Presented as "Newman Laugh-O Grams,"Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area. Through the success of Laugh-O Grams, Disney was able to acquire his own studio and hire a vast number of additional animators. Unfortunately, with all his high employee salaries unable to make up for studio profits, Walt was unable to successfully manage money as a result, the studio would become loaded with debt. The studio would eventually wind up bankrupt; Disney then set his sights on establishing a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California.
Hollywood
Disney and his brother pooled their money to set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood. Needing to find a distributor for his new Alice Comedies, which he started making while in Kansas City but never got to distribute, Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winker, who promptly wrote back to him. She was keen on a distribution deal with Disney for more live-action/animated shorts based upon Alice's Wonderland.
After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt
the need to develop a new character to replace him. He based the character on a mouse he had adopted as a pet while working in a Kansas City studio.Ub Iwerks reworked on the sketches made by Disney so that it was easier to animate it. However, Mickey's voice and personality was provided by Disney. As many of the old animators have commented, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul." Mortimer later became the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie, who was taller than his renowned adversary and had a Brooklyn accent.
1937-1941: was called "The Golden Age of Animation"
The final productions in which Disney had an active role were the animated feature, The Jungle Book and the live-action musical comedy The Happiest Millionaire, both released in 1967. Songwriter Robert B. Sherman said about the last time he saw Disney:
"He was up in the third floor of the animation building after a run-through of The Happiest Millionaire. He usually held court in the hallway afterward for the people involved with the picture. And he started talking to them, telling them what he liked and what they should change, and then, when they were through, he turned to us and with a big smile, he said, 'Keep up the good work, boys.' And he walked to his office. It was the last we ever saw of him."
Walt Disney's grave site.
In late 1966 Disney was scheduled to undergo a neck surgery for an old polo injury; Disney was a frequent polo player at The Riveria Club in Hollywood, California for many years. On November 2, 1966, during pre-surgery X-rays, doctors discovered that Disney had an enormous tumor on his left lung. Five days later, Disney went back to hospital for surgery, but the tumor had spread to such great extent that doctors had to remove his entire left lung.The doctors then told Disney that he only had six months to a year to live. After several chemotherapy sessions, on November 30, 1966, Disney collapsed in his home, but was revived by paramedics, and was taken back to the hospital, where he died on December 15, 1966 at 9:30 a.m., ten days after his 65th birthday. He was cremated on December 17, 1966 and his ashes reside at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Roy O. Disney continued to carry out the Florida project, insisting that the name be changed to Walt Disney World in honor of his brother.
A long-standing but false urban legend maintains that Disney was cryonically frozen, and his frozen corpse was stored underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. The first known instance of cryonic freezing of a corpse occurred a month later, in January 1967.
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