WALT DISNEY
Walt Disney
Biography
BIO
Walt Disney was born Walter Elias Disney in Chicago, Illinois, in 1901. His father was farmer and later an investor. Disney grew up in Missouri and attended high school in Chicago.
He served as an ambulance driver in France just after the end of World War I.
After returning to Chicago, Disney began working as a graphic artist. He became interested in animation and started a company which made short-reels for local theatres in Kansas City, Missouri called Laugh-O-Grams. After the company went bankrupt in 1923, Disney lit out with his brother Roy Disney for Hollywood and greater opportunities.
They formed the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio later that year and began producing animated short-reels for Universal Pictures. Noticing their success, Universal hired away most of their animators and started their own cartoon studio. Disney found himself again back at square one.
His remaining animator, Ubbe Iwerks who had been a animating partner of Disney in Chicago, came up with a drawing of what would later be named “Mickey Mouse”. Disney provided his voice. The sound animations were an immediate success and, in 1932, Disney received his first Academy Award “for the creation of Mickey Mouse”.
An audacious visionary, Disney would put his fledgling company under financial strain several times during his lifetime as he continually pushed the artistic and technological boundaries of the cartoon.
In 1934, Disney decided to produce a full-color feature animation based on the story of Snow White. Three years later, after ignoring pleas from his brother Roy and his wife to give up and ultimately mortgaging his home to complete it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), premiered in Los Angeles to a standing ovation. It became the most successful motion picture ever made up until that time.
Walt Disney Studios continued to issue short-reel cartoons through the 1930s and 1940s, introducing such popular characters as Donald Duck (1937) and Goofy (1939). By the 1950s, Disney had branched into documentaries and educational short-reels. In 1955, the popular Mickey Mouse Club television show was launched.
Disneyland, a theme park inspired in part by Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, California, was opened in 1955. In 1965, plans for a second theme park near Orlando, Florida to be named Disney World were announced.
Walt Disney was nominated for an Academy Award 49 times for his cartoons, documentaries and feature films. He received 23 Oscars.
He married Lillian Bounds in 1925 and the couple raised two children. Of his grandchildren, Christopher Disney Miller was an assistant director during the early 1980s.
Disney died of complications from lung cancer in Los Angeles, in 1966, at the age of 65.
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