name	Bob Iger
birth name	Robert A. Iger
birth date
birth place	New York
occupation	President and CEO, The Walt Disney Company
nationality	American
residence	Los Angeles (California)
spouse	Willow Bay
alma mater	Ithaca College }}

Robert A. "Bob" Iger (born February 10, 1951) is the president and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company. He was named president of Disney in 2000, and later succeeded Michael Eisner as chief executive in 2005, after a successful effort by Roy E. Disney to shake-up the management of the company. Iger oversaw the acquisition of Pixar in 2006, following a period of strained relations with the animation studio. He also led the company to acquire Marvel Entertainment, further broadening the Disney company's character franchises, in 2009.

Early life

His mother worked at Boardman Junior High School in Oceanside, New York and his father was executive vice president and general manager of the Greenvale Marketing Corporation, and a professor of advertising and public relations.

Iger completed his undergraduate studies at Ithaca College where he graduated ''magna cum laude'' with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television & Radio from Ithaca's Roy H. Park School of Communications. He then began his career as a weatherman for a local television station. He joined the American Broadcasting Company in 1974 and gradually rose through its ranks. Iger was instrumental in convincing ABC to pick up David Lynch's offbeat but influential Twin Peaks. He served as president of the ABC Network Television Group from 1993-94, and then was named president and chief operating officer of ABC's corporate parent, Capital Cities/ABC. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC and renamed it ABC, Inc., where Iger remained president until 1999.

Disney

On February 25, 1999, Disney named Iger president of Walt Disney International, the business unit that oversees Disney's international operations, as well as chairman of the ABC Group. Disney called the change a promotion for Iger. But the company's insistence was initially viewed with skepticism, as some thought Iger was merely being removed from day-to-day authority at ABC since ABC had been struggling.

Disney named Iger its president and chief operating officer on January 25, 2000, making him the company's number two executive under Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner. The company had been without a separate president since Eisner assumed the role following the departure of Michael Ovitz in 1997, after sixteen months at Disney.

On March 13, 2005, Disney announced that Iger would succeed Eisner as chief executive officer. On March 26, Iger reassigned Peter Murphy, the company's chief strategic officer, and pledged to disband the company's strategic planning division. Iger also vowed to restore much of the decision-making authority that the division had assumed to the company's individual business units.

The company reconciled with former board members Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold, who in July 2005 dropped their "Save Disney" campaign and agreed to work with Iger. In the process, Roy Disney was named a director emeritus and consultant.

On January 24, 2006, Disney announced it would acquire Pixar for $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction. The merger installed animator John Lasseter as chief creative officer of the Disney/Pixar animation studios and principal creative adviser for Walt Disney Imagineering, the division that designs theme park attractions. It also made Steve Jobs Disney's top shareholder with seven percent of outstanding shares, and gave him a new seat on Disney's board of directors. In same year, he also re-acquired the rights to Walt Disney's first star Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBCUniversal to release sportscaster Al Michaels from ABC Sports to NBC Sports.

Roy Disney, who had been critical of Iger for his role as Eisner's deputy, issued this statement: "Animation has always been the heart and soul of the Walt Disney Company and it is wonderful to see Bob Iger and the company embrace that heritage by bringing the outstanding animation talent of the Pixar team back into the fold. This clearly solidifies the Walt Disney Company's position as the dominant leader in motion picture animation and we applaud and support Bob Iger's vision."

Iger has cited international expansion, technological innovation and a renewed focus on traditional animation as the company's top strategic priorities.

Compensation

While CEO of Walt Disney in 2009, Iger earned total compensation of $29,028,362, which included a base salary of $2,038,462, a cash bonus of $9,260,000, stock awards of $6,336,509 and option awards of $8,308,647. Iger earned a $13.5 million bonus in 2010 which was a 45.4% increase from 2009.

Personal life

Iger is married to journalist Willow Bay and has two children with Bay, and two from a previous marriage. His children are named Katie and Amanda (from his first marriage) and Robert Maxwell and Will (from his second marriage). Not to mention he has developed a rare medical condition scientificly named buttocus shines (shiney butt syndrome) in which he develops an unaturally shiney buttox. This he has had since the age of 27. As far as we know this has run in the family for generations. Each male in the family develops this disese at the age of 27. We believe this will continue for generations to come. In happier terms his children are healthy and smart and have not developed this condition... yet.

References

External links

Corporate biography

Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:People from Long Beach, New York Category:American media executives Category:Disney people Category:Ithaca College alumni Category:American Broadcasting Company executives

de:Robert Iger es:Robert Iger fr:Robert Iger id:Bob Iger pl:Robert Iger pt:Robert Iger ro:Bob Iger fi:Robert Iger sv:Robert Iger tl:Robert Iger

name	Walt Disney
birth name	Walter Elias Disney
birth date	December 05, 1901
birth place	Hermosa, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
death date	December 15, 1966
death place	Burbank, California, U.S. Interred: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California, U.S.
occupation	Film producer, Co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, formerly known as Walt Disney Productions
yearsactive	1920–1966
spouse	Lillian Bounds (1925–1966)
parents	Elias DisneyFlora Call Disney
relations	Herbert Arthur Disney (brother)Raymond Arnold Disney (brother)Roy Oliver Disney (brother)Ruth Flora Disney (sister)Ronald William Miller (son-in-law)Robert Borgfeldt Brown (son-in-law)Roy Edward Disney (nephew)
children	Diane Marie DisneySharon Mae Disney
religion	Christian (Congregationalist)
party	Republican
signature	Walt Disney Signature 2.svg }}

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and has annual revenues of approximately USD $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won twenty-two Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney, Disneyland Paris, and Disneyland Hong Kong.

The year after his December 15, 1966 death from lung cancer in Burbank, California, construction began on Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. His brother Roy Disney inaugurated the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971.

1901–1937: Beginnings

Childhood

Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 2156 N. Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa community area to Irish-Canadian father Elias Disney and German-American mother Flora Call Disney. His great-grandfather, Arundel Elias Disney, had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny, Ireland where he was born in 1801. Arundel Disney was a descendant of Robert d'Isigny, a Frenchman who had travelled to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. With the d'Isigny name anglicised as "Disney", the family settled in a village now known as Norton Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.

In 1878, Disney's father Elias had moved from Huron County, Ontario, Canada to the United States at first seeking gold in California before finally settling down to farm with his parents near Ellis, Kansas, until 1884. Elias worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and married Flora Call on January 1, 1888, in Acron, Florida. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1890, hometown of his brother Robert who helped Elias financially for most of his early life. In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland. In Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing with one of the family's neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, paying him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse, Rupert. His interest in trains also developed in Marceline, a town that owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran through it. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming train then try and spot his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, running the train.

The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years, before moving to Kansas City in 1911 where Walt and his younger sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar School. At school he met Walter Pfeiffer who came from a family of theatre aficionados, and introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Before long Walt was spending more time at the Pfeiffers' than at home. As well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute, Walt often took Ruth to Electric Park, 15 blocks from their home, which Disney would later acknowledge as a major influence of his design of Disneyland).

Teenage years

In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city, where in the fall Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Art Institute. He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic topics and focusing on World War I. Despite dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen to join the army, Disney was rejected for being underage.

After his rejection by the army, Walt and a friend decided to join the Red Cross. Soon after joining he was sent to France for a year, where he drove an ambulance, but only after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.

Hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory, in 1919 Walt moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career. After considering whether to become an actor or a newspaper artist, he decided on a career as a newspaper artist, 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, then working in a local bank, got Walt a temporary job through a bank colleague at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio where he created advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. At Pesmen-Rubin he met cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks and when their time at the studio expired, they decided to start their own commercial company together.

In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks formed a short-lived company called, "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". However, following a rough start, Disney left temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, and was soon joined by Iwerks who was not able to run their business alone. While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animations, Disney became interested in animation, and decided to become an animator. The owner of the Ad Company, A.V. Cauger, allowed him to borrow a camera from work to experiment with at home. After reading the Edwin G. Lutz book ''Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development'', Disney considered cel 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, Fred Harman, as his first employee. Walt and Harman then secured a deal with local theater owner Frank L. Newman, arguably the most popular "showman" in the Kansas City area at the time, to screen their cartoons at his local theater, which they titled ''Laugh-O-Grams''.

Laugh-O-Gram Studio

Presented as "Newman Laugh-O-Grams", Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area and through their success, he was able to acquire his own studio, also called Laugh-O-Gram, for which he hired a vast number of additional animators, including Fred Harman's brother Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and his close friend Ubbe Iwerks. Unfortunately, studio profits were insufficient to cover the high salaries paid to employees. Unable to successfully manage money, Disney's studio became loaded with debt and wound up bankrupt whereupon he decided to set up a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California.

Hollywood

Disney and his brother Roy pooled their money and set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood where they needed to find a distributor for Walt's new Alice Comedies, which he had started making while in Kansas City but never got to distribute. Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who promptly wrote back to him that she was keen on a distribution deal for more live-action/animated shorts based upon ''Alice's Wonderland''.

Alice Comedies

Virginia Davis, the live-action star of ''Alice’s Wonderland'' and her family relocated from Kansas City to Hollywood at Disney's request, as did Iwerks and his family. This was the beginning of the Disney Brothers' Studio located on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district, where it remained until 1939. In 1925, Disney hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. After a brief courtship, the pair married that same year.

The new series, ''Alice Comedies'', proved reasonably successful, and featured both Dawn O'Day and Margie Gay as Alice with Lois Hardwick also briefly assuming the role. By the time the series ended in 1927, its focus was more on the animated characters and in particular a cat named Julius who resembled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

By 1927, Charles Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business. He then ordered a new all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, ''Oswald the Lucky Rabbit'', was an almost instant success, and the character, Oswald — drawn and created by Iwerks — became a popular figure. The Disney studio expanded and Walt re-hired Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng from Kansas City.

Disney went to New York in February 1928 to negotiate a higher fee per short and was shocked when Mintz told him that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short but also that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng—but not Iwerks, who refused to leave Disney—under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark, and could make the films without Walt. Disney declined Mintz's offer and as a result lost most of his animation staff whereupon he found himself on his own again.

It subsequently took his company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character when in 2006 the Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal, through a trade for longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels.

Mickey Mouse

After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a new character to replace him, which was based on a mouse he had adopted as a pet while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. Ub Iwerks reworked the sketches made by Disney to make the character easier to animate although Mickey's voice and personality were provided by Disney himself until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul." Besides Oswald and Mickey, a similar mouse-character is seen in the ''Alice Comedies'', which featured "Ike the Mouse". Moreover, the first Flip the Frog cartoon called Fiddlesticks showed a Mickey Mouse look-alike playing fiddle. The initial films were animated by Iwerks with his name prominently featured on the title cards. Originally named "Mortimer", the mouse was later re-christened "Mickey" by Lillian Disney who thought that the name Mortimer did not fit. Mortimer later became the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie – taller than his renowned adversary and speaking with a Brooklyn accent.

The first animated short to feature Mickey, ''Plane Crazy'' was a silent film like all of Disney's previous works. After failing to find a distributor for the short and its follow-up, ''The Gallopin' Gaucho'', Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound entitled ''Steamboat Willie''. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. ''Steamboat Willie'' became an instant success, and ''Plane Crazy'', ''The Galloping Gaucho'', and all future Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. After the release of ''Steamboat Willie'', Disney successfully used sound in all of his subsequent cartoons, and Cinephone also became the new distributor for Disney's early sound cartoons. Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character and by 1930, despite their having sound, cartoons featuring Felix had faded from the screen after failing to gain attention. Mickey's popularity would subsequently skyrocket in the early 1930s.

''Silly Symphonies''

Following in the footsteps of ''Mickey Mouse series'', a series of musical shorts titled, ''Silly Symphonies'' were released in 1929. The first, ''The Skeleton Dance'' was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929. Although both series were successful, the Disney studio was not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers, and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons was their musical novelty with the first Silly Symphony cartoons featuring scores by Carl Stalling.

Iwerks was soon lured by Powers into opening his own studio with an exclusive contract, while Stalling would also later leave Disney to join Iwerks. Iwerks launched his ''Flip the Frog'' series with the first voiced color cartoon ''Fiddlesticks'', filmed in two-strip Technicolor. Iwerks also created two other cartoon series, ''Willie Whopper'' and the ''Comicolor''. In 1936, Iwerks shut down his studio in order to work on various projects dealing with animation technology. He would return to Disney in 1940 and go on to pioneer a number of film processes and specialized animation technologies in the studio's research and development department.

By 1932, although Mickey Mouse had become a relatively popular cinema character, ''Silly Symphonies'' was not as successful. The same year also saw competition increase as Max Fleischer's flapper cartoon character, Betty Boop, gained popularity among theater audiences. Fleischer, considered Disney's main rival in the 1930s, was also the father of Richard Fleischer, whom Disney would later hire to direct his 1954 film ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea''. Meanwhile, Columbia Pictures dropped the distribution of Disney cartoons to be replaced by United Artists. In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera, approached Walt and convinced him to reshoot the black and white ''Flowers and Trees'' in three-strip Technicolor. ''Flowers and Trees'' would go on to be a phenomenal success and would also win the first 1932 Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. After the release of ''Flowers and Trees'', all subsequent ''Silly Symphony'' cartoons were in color while Disney was also able to negotiate a two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their three-strip process, a period eventually extended to five years. Through ''Silly Symphonies'', Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time, ''The Three Little Pigs'' (1933). The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, featuring the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf".

First Academy Award

In 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of "Mickey Mouse", a series which switched to color in 1935 and soon launched spin-offs for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. Pluto and Donald became standalone cartoons in 1937, with Goofy following in 1939. Of all Mickey's partners, Donald Duck, who first teamed up with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon, ''Orphan's Benefit'', was arguably the most popular, going on to become Disney's second most successful cartoon character of all time.

Children

The Disneys' first attempt at pregnancy ended when Lillian miscarried. She became pregnant again and gave birth to a daughter, Diane Marie Disney, on December 18, 1933. The Disneys adopted Sharon Mae Disney (December 31, 1936 – February 16, 1993).

1937–1941: Golden age of animation

"Disney's Folly": ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs''

[[Image:Walt Disney Snow white 1937 trailer screenshot (13).jpg|left|thumb|Walt Disney introduces each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 ''Snow White'' theatrical trailer.]]

Following the creation of two cartoon series, in 1934 Disney began planning a full-length feature. The following year, opinion polls showed that another cartoon series, ''Popeye the Sailor'', produced by Max Fleischer, was more popular than Mickey Mouse. Nevertheless, Disney was able to put Mickey back on top as well as increase his popularity by colorizing and partially redesigning the character to become what was considered his most appealing design to date. When the film industry learned of Disney's plans to produce an ''animated'' feature-length version of ''Snow White'', they were certain that the endeavor would destroy the Disney Studio and dubbed the project "Disney's Folly". Both Lillian and Roy tried to talk Disney out of the project, but he continued plans for the feature, employing Chouinard Art Institute professor Don Graham to start a training operation for the studio staff. Disney then used the ''Silly Symphonies'' as a platform for experiments in realistic human animation, distinctive character animation, special effects, and the use of specialized processes and apparatus such as the multiplane camera – a new technique first used by Disney in the 1937 ''Silly Symphonies'' short ''The Old Mill''.

All of this development and training was used to increase quality at the studio and to ensure that the feature film would match Disney's quality expectations. Entitled ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'', the feature went into full production in 1934 and continued until mid-1937, when the studio ran out of money. To obtain the funding to complete ''Snow White'', Disney had to show a rough cut of the motion picture to loan officers at the Bank of America, who then gave the studio the money to finish the picture. The film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater on December 21, 1937 and at its conclusion the audience gave ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' a standing ovation. ''Snow White'', the first animated feature in America made in Technicolor, was released in February 1938 under a new distribution deal with RKO Radio Pictures. RKO had been the distributor for Disney cartoons in 1936, after it closed down the Van Beuren Studios in exchange for distribution. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over $8 million on its initial release.

Golden age of animation

Following the success of ''Snow White'', for which Disney received one full-size, and seven miniature Oscar statuettes, he was able to build a new campus for the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, which opened for business on December 24, 1939. ''Snow White'' was not only the peak of Disney's success, but also ushered in a period that would later be known as the Golden Age of Animation for the studio. Feature animation staff, having just completed ''Pinocchio'', continued work on ''Fantasia'' and ''Bambi'' as well as the early production stages of ''Alice in Wonderland'', ''Peter Pan'' and ''Wind in the Willows'' while the shorts staff carried on working on the ''Mickey Mouse'', ''Donald Duck'', ''Goofy'', and ''Pluto'' cartoon series, ending the ''Silly Symphonies'' at this time. Animator Fred Moore had redesigned Mickey Mouse in the late 1930s after Donald Duck overtook him in popularity among theater audiences.

''Pinocchio'' and ''Fantasia'' followed ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' into the movie theaters in 1940, but both proved financial disappointments. The inexpensive ''Dumbo'' was then planned as an income generator, but during production most of the animation staff went on strike, permanently straining relations between Disney and his artists.

1941–1945: World War II era

In 1941, the U.S. State Department sent Disney and a group of animators to South America as part of its Good Neighbor policy, at the same time guaranteeing financing for the resultant movie, ''Saludos Amigos''.

Shortly after the release of ''Dumbo'' in October 1941, the United States entered World War II. The U.S. Army contracted most of the Disney studio's facilities where the staff created training and instruction films for the military, home-front morale-boosting shorts such as ''Der Fuehrer's Face'' and the 1943 feature film ''Victory Through Air Power''. However, military films did not generate income, and the feature film ''Bambi'' underperformed on its release in April 1942. Disney successfully re-issued ''Snow White'' in 1944, establishing a seven-year re-release tradition for his features. In 1945, ''The Three Caballeros'' was the last animated feature released by the studio during the war.

In 1944, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' publisher William Benton, entered into unsuccessful negotiations with Disney to make six to twelve educational films per annum. Disney was asked by the US Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), to make an educational film about the Amazon Basin, which resulted in the 1944 animated short, ''The Amazon Awakens''.

1945–1955: Post-war period

Disney studios also created inexpensive package films, containing collections of cartoon shorts, and issued them to theaters during this period. These included ''Make Mine Music'' (1946), ''Melody Time'' (1948), ''Fun and Fancy Free'' (1947) and ''The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad'' (1949). The latter had only two sections, the first based on ''The Wind in the Willows'' by Kenneth Grahame, and the second on ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' by Washington Irving. During this period, Disney also ventured into full-length dramatic films that mixed live action and animated scenes, including ''Song of the South'' and ''So Dear to My Heart''. After the war ended, Mickey's popularity would also fade.

By the late 1940s, the studio had recovered enough to continue production on the full-length features ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Peter Pan'', both of which had been shelved during the war years. Work also began on ''Cinderella'', which became Disney's most successful film since ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs''. In 1948 the studio also initiated a series of live-action nature films, titled ''True-Life Adventures'', with ''On Seal Island'' the first. Despite its resounding success with feature films, the studio's animation shorts were no longer as popular as they once were, with people paying more attention to Warner Bros. and their animation star Bugs Bunny. By 1942, Leon Schlesinger Productions, which produced the Warner Bros. cartoons, had become the country's most popular animation studio. However, while Bugs Bunny's popularity rose in the 1940s, so did Donald Duck's, a character who would replace Mickey Mouse as Disney's star character by 1949.

During the mid-1950s, Disney produced a number of educational films on the space program in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun: ''Man in Space'' and ''Man and the Moon'' in 1955, and ''Mars and Beyond'' in 1957.

Testimony before Congress

Disney was a founding member of the anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In 1947, during the early years of the Cold War, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators and labor union organizers, Communist agitators. All three men denied the allegations and Sorrell went on to testify before the HUAC in 1946 when insufficient evidence was found to link him to the Communist Party.

Disney also accused the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front, and charged that the 1941 strike was part of an organized Communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood.

1955–1966: Theme parks and beyond

Planning Disneyland

On a business trip to Chicago in the late-1940s, Disney drew sketches of his ideas for an amusement park where he envisioned his employees spending time with their children. The idea for a children's theme park came after a visit to Children's Fairyland in Oakland, California. This plan was originally intended to be built on a plot located across the street to the south of the studio. These original ideas developed into a concept for a larger enterprise that would become Disneyland. Disney spent five years developing Disneyland and created a new subsidiary company, WED Enterprises, to carry out planning and production of the park. A small group of Disney studio employees joined the Disneyland development project as engineers and planners, and were dubbed Imagineers.

As Disney explained one of his earliest plans to Herb Ryman, who created the first aerial drawing of Disneyland presented to the Bank of America during fund raising for the project, he said, "Herbie, I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train." Entertaining his daughters and their friends in his backyard and taking them for rides on his Carolwood Pacific Railroad had inspired Disney to include a railroad in the plans for Disneyland.

Disneyland grand opening

Disneyland officially opened on July 18, 1955. On Sunday, July 17, 1955, Disneyland hosted a live TV preview, among the thousands of people in attendance were Ronald Reagan, Bob Cummings and Art Linkletter, who shared cohosting duties, as well as the mayor of Anaheim. Walt gave the following dedication day speech:

Carolwood Pacific Railroad

During 1949, Disney and his family moved to a new home on a large piece of land in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, California. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, who already had their own backyard railroad, Disney developed blueprints and immediately set to work on creating a miniature live steam railroad for his backyard. The name of the railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, came from his home's location on Carolwood Drive. The railroad's half-mile long layout included a long trestle bridge, loops, overpasses, gradients, an elevated berm, and a tunnel underneath his wife's flowerbed. He named the miniature working steam locomotive built by Disney Studios engineer Roger E. Broggie ''Lilly Belle'' in his wife's honor and had his attorney draw up right-of-way papers giving the railroad a permanent, legal easement through the garden areas, which his wife dutifully signed; however, there is no evidence of the documents ever recorded as a restriction on the property's title.

Expansion into new areas

As Walt Disney Productions began work on Disneyland, it also began expanding its other entertainment operations. In 1950, ''Treasure Island'' became the studio's first all-live-action feature, soon followed by ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'' (in CinemaScope, 1954), ''Old Yeller'' (1957), ''The Shaggy Dog'' (1959), ''Pollyanna'' (1960), ''Swiss Family Robinson'' (1960), ''The Absent-Minded Professor'' (1961), and ''The Parent Trap'' (1961). The studio produced its first TV special, ''One Hour in Wonderland'', in 1950. Disney began hosting a weekly anthology series on ABC entitled ''Disneyland'', after the park, on which he aired clips of past Disney productions, gave tours of his studio, and familiarized the public with Disneyland as it was being constructed in Anaheim. The show also featured a Davy Crockett miniseries, which started the "Davy Crockett craze" among American youth, during which millions of coonskin caps and other Crockett memorabilia were sold across the country. In 1955, the studio's first daily television show, ''Mickey Mouse Club'' debuted and would continue in various incarnations into the 1990s.

As the studio expanded and diversified into other media, Disney devoted less of his attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his key animators, whom he dubbed the Nine Old Men. Although he was spending less time supervising the production of the animated films, he was always present at story meetings.. During Disney's lifetime, the animation department created the successful ''Lady and the Tramp'' ( the first animated film in CinemaScope) in 1955, ''Sleeping Beauty'' ( the first animated film in Super Technirama 70mm) in 1959, ''One Hundred and One Dalmatians'' (the first animated feature film to use Xerox cels) in 1961, and ''The Sword in the Stone'' in 1963.

Production of short cartoons kept pace until 1956, when Disney shut down the responsible division although special shorts projects would continue for the remainder of the studio's duration on an irregular basis. These productions were all distributed by Disney's new subsidiary, Buena Vista Distribution, which had taken over all distribution duties for Disney films from RKO by 1955. Disneyland, one of the world's first theme parks, finally opened on July 17, 1955, and was immediately successful. Visitors from around the world came to visit Disneyland, which contained attractions based on a number of successful Disney characters and films.

After 1955, the ''Disneyland'' TV show was renamed ''Walt Disney Presents''. It switched from black-and-white to color in 1961 and changed its name to ''Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color'', at the same time moving from ABC to NBC, and eventually evolving into its current form as ''The Wonderful World of Disney''. The series continued to air on NBC until 1981, when it was picked up by CBS. Since then, it has aired on ABC, NBC, the Hallmark Channel and the Cartoon Network via separate broadcast rights deals. During its run, the Disney series offered some recurring characters, such as the newspaper reporter and sleuth "Gallegher" played by Roger Mobley with a plot based on the writings of Richard Harding Davis.

Disney had already formed his own music publishing division in 1949 and in 1956, partly inspired by the huge success of the television theme song The Ballad of Davy Crockett, he created a company-owned record production and distribution entity called Disneyland Records.

Early 1960s successes

By the early 1960s, the Disney empire had become a major success, and Walt Disney Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family entertainment. Walt Disney was the Head of Pageantry for the 1960 Winter Olympics.

After decades of pursuit, Disney finally acquired the rights to P.L. Travers' books about a magical nanny. ''Mary Poppins'', released in 1964, was the most successful Disney film of the 1960s and featured a memorable song score written by Disney favorites, the Sherman Brothers. The same year, Disney debuted a number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair, including Audio-Animatronic figures, all of which were later integrated into attractions at Disneyland and a new theme park project which was to be established on the East Coast.

Although the studio would probably have proved major competition for Hanna-Barbera, Disney decided not to enter the race and mimic Hanna-Barbera by producing Saturday morning TV cartoon series. With the expansion of Disney's empire and constant production of feature films, the financial burden involved in such a move would have proven too great.

Plans for Disney World and EPCOT

In early 1964, Disney announced plans to develop another theme park to be called Disney World a few miles west of Orlando, Florida. Disney World was to include "the Magic Kingdom", a larger, more elaborate version of Disneyland. It would also feature a number of golf courses and resort hotels. The heart of Disney World, however, was to be the Experimental Prototype City (or Community) of Tomorrow, known as EPCOT for short.

Mineral King Ski Resort

During the early to mid 1960s, Walt Disney developed plans for a ski resort in Mineral King, a glacial valley in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. He brought in experts such as the renowned Olympic ski coach and ski-area designer Willy Schaeffler, who helped plan a visitor village, ski runs and ski lifts among the several bowls surrounding the valley. Plans finally moved into action in the mid 1960s, but Walt died before the actual work started. Disney's death and opposition from conservationists ensured that the resort was never built.

Death

In 1966, Disney was scheduled to undergo surgery to repair an old neck injury caused by many years of playing polo at the Riviera Club in Hollywood. On November 2, during pre-operative X-rays, doctors at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, across the street from the Disney Studio, discovered a tumor in his left lung. Five days later a biopsy showed the tumor to be malignant and to have spread throughout the entire left lung. After removal of the lung, doctors informed Disney that his life expectancy was six months to two years. After several chemotherapy sessions, Disney and his wife spent a short amount of time in Palm Springs, California. On November 30, Disney collapsed at his home. He was revived by fire department personnel and rushed to St. Joseph's where on December 15, 1966, at 9:30 a.m., ten days after his 65th birthday, Disney died of acute circulatory collapse, caused by lung cancer. The last thing he reportedly wrote before his death was the name of actor Kurt Russell, the significance of which remains a mystery, even to Russell.

Disney was cremated on December 17, 1966, and his ashes interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Roy O. Disney continued out with the Florida project, insisting that the name be changed to Walt Disney World in honor of his brother.

The final productions in which Disney played an active role were the animated features ''The Jungle Book'' and ''Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day'', as well as the live-action musical comedy ''The Happiest Millionaire'', both released in 1967. Songwriter Robert B. Sherman recalled of the last time he saw Disney: }}

A long-standing urban legend maintains that Disney was cryogenically frozen, and his frozen corpse stored beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. However, the first known cryogenic freezing of a human corpse did not occur until January 1967, more than a month after his death.

Legacy: 1967–present

Continuing Disney Productions

After Walt Disney's death, Roy Disney returned from retirement to take full control of Walt Disney Productions and WED Enterprises. In October 1971, the families of Walt and Roy met in front of Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom to officially open the Walt Disney World Resort.

After giving his dedication for Walt Disney World, Roy asked Lillian Disney to join him. As the orchestra played "When You Wish Upon a Star", she stepped up to the podium accompanied by Mickey Mouse. He then said, "Lilly, you knew all of Walt's ideas and hopes as well as anybody; what would Walt think of it [Walt Disney World]?". "I think Walt would have approved," she replied. Roy died from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 20, 1971, the day he was due to open the Disneyland Christmas parade. During the second phase of the "Walt Disney World" theme park, EPCOT was translated by Disney's successors into EPCOT Center, which opened in 1982. As it currently exists, EPCOT is essentially a living world's fair, different from the actual functional city that Disney had envisioned. In 1992, Walt Disney Imagineering took the step closer to Disney's original ideas and dedicated Celebration, Florida, a town built by the Walt Disney Company adjacent to Walt Disney World, that hearkens back to the spirit of EPCOT. EPCOT was also originally intended to be devoid of Disney characters which initially limited the appeal of the park to young children. However, the company later changed this policy and Disney characters can now be found throughout the park, often dressed in costumes reflecting the different pavilions.

The Disney entertainment empire

Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme parks have developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture, vacation destination and media corporation that carry his name. Among other assets The Walt Disney Company owns five vacation resorts, eleven theme parks, two water parks, thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels, eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television network. As of 2007, the company had annual revenues of over U.S. $35 billion.

Disney Animation

Walt Disney was a pioneer in character animation. He was one of the first people to move away from basic cartoons with just ''"impossible outlandish gags"'' and crudely drawn characters to an art form with heartwarming stories and characters the audience can connect to on an emotional level. The personality displayed in the characters of his films and the technological advancements remain influential when animating today. He was also considered by many of his colleagues to be a master storyteller and the animation department did not fully recover from his demise until the late 1980's in a period known as the Disney Renaissance. The most finacially and critically successful films produced during this time include Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994). In 1995 Walt Disney Pictures distributed Pixar's Toy Story, the first computer animated feature film. Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney claimed that Walt would have loved ''Toy Story'' and that it was ''"his kind of movie"'' . With the rise of computer animated films a stream of financially unsuccessful Traditional hand-drawn animated features in the early 2000s emerged. This led to the company's controversial decision to close the traditional animation department. The two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank was converted to a computer animation production facility, firing hundreds of people in the process. In 2004, Disney released what was announced as their final "traditionally animated" feature film, ''Home on the Range''. However, since the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, and the resulting rise of John Lasseter to Chief Creative Officer, that position has changed with the largely successful 2009 film ''The Princess and the Frog''. This marked Disney's return to traditional hand-drawn animation and the studio hired back staff who had been laid-off in the past. Today Disney produces both traditional and computer animation.

CalArts

In his later years, Disney devoted substantial time to funding The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Formed in 1961 through a merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute, which had helped in the training of the animation staff during the 1930s, when Disney died, one-fourth of his estate went to CalArts, which helped in building its campus. In his will, Disney paved the way for the creation of several charitable trusts which included one for the California Institute of the Arts and other for the Disney Foundation. He also donated of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for construction of the school. CalArts moved onto the Valencia campus in 1972.

In an early admissions bulletin, Disney explained: }}

Walt Disney Family Museum

In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in the Presidio of San Francisco. Thousands of artifacts from Disney's life and career are on display, including 248 awards that he received.

Anti-Semitism accusations

Disney was long rumored to be anti-Semitic during his lifetime, and such rumors have persisted after his death. Disney biographer Neal Gabler, the first writer to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives, concluded in 2006 that available evidence does not support such accusations. In a CBS interview Gabler summarized his findings: }} Disney eventually distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance in the 1950s.

The Walt Disney Family Museum acknowledges that Disney did have "difficult relationships" with some Jewish individuals, and that ethnic stereotypes common to films of the 1930s were included in some early cartoons, such as ''Three Little Pigs''. However, the museum points out that Disney employed Jews throughout his career and was named "1955 Man Of The Year" by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills.

Academy Awards

Walt Disney holds the record for both the most Academy Award nominations (59) and the number of Oscars awarded (22). He also earned four honorary Oscars while his last competitive Academy Award was posthumous.

1932: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Flowers and Trees (1932)

1932: Honorary Award for: creation of Mickey Mouse.

1934: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Little Pigs (1933)

1935: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Tortoise and the Hare (1934)

1936: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Orphan Kittens (1935)

1937: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Country Cousin (1936)

1938: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Old Mill (1937)

1939: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ferdinand the Bull (1938)

1939: Honorary Award for ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' (1937) The citation read: ''"For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field"'' (the award was one statuette and seven miniature statuettes)

1940: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ugly Duckling (1939)

1941: Honorary Award for: Fantasia (1940), shared with: William E. Garity and J.N.A. Hawkins. The citation for the certificate of merit read: ''"For their outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of ''Fantasia''"''

1942: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Lend a Paw (1941)

1943: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)

1949: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Seal Island (1948)

1949: Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (Honorary Award)

1951: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Beaver Valley (1950)

1952: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Nature's Half Acre (1951)

1953: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Water Birds (1952)

1954: Best Documentary, Features for: The Living Desert (1953)

1954: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: The Alaskan Eskimo (1953)

1954: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953)

1954: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Bear Country (1953)

1955: Best Documentary, Features for: The Vanishing Prairie (1954)

1956: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: Men Against the Arctic

1959: Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects for: Grand Canyon

1969: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

Other honors

Walt Disney was the inaugural recipient of a star on the Anaheim walk of stars awarded in recognition of his significant contribution to the city of Anaheim and specifically Disneyland, which is now the Disneyland Resort. The star is located at the pedestrian entrance to the Disneyland Resort on Harbor Boulevard. Disney has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and the other for his television work.

Walt Disney received the Congressional Gold Medal on May 24, 1968 (P.L. 90-316, 82 Stat. 130–131) and the Légion d'Honneur awarded by France in 1935. In 1935, Walt received a special medal from the League of Nations for creation of Mickey Mouse, held to be Mickey Mouse award. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964. On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Walt Disney into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.

A minor planet, 4017 Disneya, discovered in 1980 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina, is named after him.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, opened in 2003, was named in his honor.

In 1993, HBO began development of a Walt Disney biopic directed by Frank Pierson and featuring Lawrence Turman but the project never materialized and was soon abandoned. However, ''Walt - The Man Behind the Myth'', a biographical documentary about Disney, was later made.

See also

Disney family

The Mickey Mouse Club

The Walt Disney Family Museum

Walt Disney anthology television series

Notes

References

Further reading

Barrier, Michael (1999). ''Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.

Broggie, Michael (1997, 1998, 2005). ''Walt Disney's Railroad Story''. Virginia Beach, Virginia. Donning Publishers. ISBN 1-56342-009-0

Eliot, Marc (1993). ''Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince''. Carol. ISBN 1-55972-174-X

Mosley, Leonard. ''Disney's World: A Biography'' (1985, 2002). Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House. ISBN 0-8128-8514-7.

Gabler, Neal. ''Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination'' (2006). New York, NY. Random House. ISBN 0-679-43822-X

Schickel, Richard, and Dee, Ivan R. (1967, 1985, 1997). ''The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney''. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. ISBN 1-56663-158-0.

Sherman, Robert B. and Sherman, Richard M. (1998) "Walt's Time: From Before to Beyond" ISBN 0-9646059-3-7

Watts, Steven, ''The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life'', University of Missouri Press, 2001, ISBN 0826213790

External links

Discusses Walt Disney's attitude towards unions and communism.

Walt Disney Family Museum

Neal Gabler, Inside Walt Disney

Interview with Robert Stack About Walt Disney's Involvement in Polo

Walt Disney Gravesite

Disney's Fantastic Voyage

History of Walt Disney

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af:Walt Disney ar:والت ديزني an:Walt Disney az:Uolt Disney bn:ওয়াল্ট ডিজনি be:Уолт Дысней be-x-old:Ўолт Дыснэй bs:Walt Disney br:Walt Disney bg:Уолт Дисни ca:Walt Disney cs:Walt Disney cy:Walt Disney da:Walt Disney de:Walt Disney et:Walt Disney el:Ουώλτ Ντίσνεϋ es:Walt Disney eo:Walt Disney ext:Walt Disney eu:Walt Disney fa:والت دیزنی hif:Walt Disney fr:Walt Disney fy:Walt Disney ga:Walt Disney gl:Walt Disney ko:월트 디즈니 hi:वॉल्ट डिज़्नी hr:Walt Disney io:Walt Disney id:Walt Disney ia:Walt Disney os:Дисней, Уолт is:Walt Disney it:Walt Disney he:וולט דיסני jv:Walt Disney kn:ವಾಲ್ಟ್ ಡಿಸ್ನಿ ka:უოლტ დისნეი kk:Уолт Дисней sw:Walt Disney la:Gualterius Elias Disney lv:Volts Disnejs lb:Walt Disney lt:Walt Disney li:Walt Disney hu:Walt Disney mk:Волт Дизни ml:വാൾട്ട് ഡിസ്നി mr:वॉल्ट डिस्नी arz:والت ديزنى ms:Walt Disney mn:Уолт Дисней nl:Walt Disney new:वाल्ट डिज्नी ja:ウォルト・ディズニー no:Walt Disney nn:Walt Disney oc:Walt Disney pnb:والٹ ڈزنی nds:Walt Disney pl:Walt Disney pt:Walt Disney kbd:Уолт Дисней ro:Walt Disney qu:Walt Disney rue:Уолт Дісней ru:Дисней, Уолт sah:Уолт Дисней se:Walt Disney sa:वाल्ट डिज्नी sq:Walt Disney scn:Walt Disney simple:Walt Disney sk:Walt Disney sl:Walt Disney szl:Walt Disney sr:Волт Дизни sh:Walt Disney fi:Walt Disney sv:Walt Disney tl:Walt Disney ta:வால்ட் டிஸ்னி tt:Уолт Дисней te:వాల్ట్ డిస్నీ th:วอลต์ ดิสนีย์ tg:Уолтер Элайас Дисней tr:Walt Disney uk:Волт Дісней ur:والٹ ڈزنی vi:Walt Disney vo:Walt Disney war:Walt Disney zh-yue:和路迪士尼 bat-smg:Volts Dėsniejos zh:華特·迪士尼

Name	George Lucas
Birth date	May 14, 1944
Birth place	Modesto, California, U.S.
Residence	Marin County, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Modesto Junior College
Alma mater	University of Southern California (B.A. and B.S.)
Occupation	Chairman & CEO of LucasfilmFilm director, film producer, screenwriter
Years active	1965–present
Influences	*Frank Herbert Joseph Campbell
Net worth	US$3.2 billion (2011)
Home town	Central Valley, California, U.S.
Spouse	Marcia Lucas (1969–1983)
Partner	Mellody Hobson (2007–present) }}

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise ''Star Wars'' and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.

Early life and education

George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.

Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film ''1:42.08'', as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, ''American Graffiti''. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.

As a child, Lucas never learned to swim, which became a source of embarrassment and frustration as he became older. Lucas has expressed in several interviews that his inability to swim was "the passion that drove me to succeed in filmmaking... [It] gave me the chip on my shoulder that I think was critical to my later success"

During this time, an experimental filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses. These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.

"That's when he [George] really started exploring" Plummer recalled. "We went to a theater on Union Street that shows art films, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been an uninterested slacker in high school. At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry — famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," Wexler recalls.

Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood and John Milius, they became a clique of film students known as The Dirty Dozen. He also became very good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker and future ''Indiana Jones'' collaborator, Steven Spielberg. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich, a film theoretician comparable in historical importance to Sergei Eisenstein, who moved to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM, RKO, and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.

Lucas saw many inspiring films in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, the French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinéma vérité ''60 Cycles'', the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cinéma vérité with such titles as ''Look at Life'', ''Herbie'', ''1:42.08'', ''The Emperor'', ''Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town'', ''Filmmaker'', and ''6-18-67''. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema.

''Star Wars'' quickly became the highest-grossing film of all-time, displaced five years later by Spielberg’s ''E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial''. During the filming of ''Star Wars'', Lucas waived his up-front fee as director and negotiated to own the licensing rights (for novelizations, T-shirts, toys, etc.) —rights which the studio thought were nearly worthless . This decision earned him hundreds of millions of dollars , as he was able to directly profit from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise. This accumulated capital enabled him to finance the sequel himself.

Over the two decades after the first ''Star Wars'' film, Lucas worked extensively as a writer and/or producer, including the many Star Wars spinoffs made for film, TV, and other media. He acted as executive producer for the next two ''Star Wars'' films, assigning the direction of ''The Empire Strikes Back'' to Irvin Kershner and ''Return of the Jedi'' to Richard Marquand, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan on the latter. Lucas also acted as executive producer and story writer on all four of the ''Indiana Jones'' films, which he convinced his colleague and good friend, Steven Spielberg, to direct. Other notable projects as a producer or executive producer in this period include Kurosawa's ''Kagemusha'' (1980), Lawrence Kasdan's ''Body Heat'' (1981), Jim Henson's ''Labyrinth'' (1986), Godfrey Reggio's ''Powaqqatsi'' (1986) and the animated film ''The Land Before Time'' (1988). There were also some less successful projects, however, including ''More American Graffiti'' (1979), the ill-fated ''Howard the Duck'' (1986), which was arguably the biggest flop of his career; ''Willow'' (1988, which Lucas also wrote); and Coppola's ''Tucker: The Man and His Dream'' (1988). Between 1992 and 1996, Lucas served as executive producer for the television spinoff ''The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles''. In 1997, for the 20th anniversary of ''Star Wars,'' Lucas went back to his trilogy to enhance and add certain scenes using newly available digital technology. These new versions were released in theaters as the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition. For DVD releases in 2004, this series has received further revisions to make them congruent with the prequel trilogy. Besides the additions to the Star Wars franchise, Lucas released Special Edition director's cuts of THX 1138 and American Graffiti containing a number of CGI revisions.

The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group , one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Pixar's early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as ''Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan'' and ''Young Sherlock Holmes'', and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple after a power struggle at Apple Computer. Jobs paid U.S. $5 million to Lucas and put U.S. $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas' desire to stop the cash flow losses from his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company's new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash-flow difficulties following Lucas' 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden dropoff in revenues from ''Star Wars'' licenses following the release of ''Return of the Jedi''.

The sound-equipped system, THX Ltd, was founded by Lucas and Tomlinson Holman . The company was formerly owned by Lucasfilm, and contains equipment for stereo, digital, and theatrical sound for films, and music. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields . Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, is well respected in the gaming industry .

In 1994, Lucas began work on the screenplay for the prequel ''The Phantom Menace'', which would be the first film he had directed in over two decades. ''The Phantom Menace'' was released in 1999, beginning a new trilogy of Star Wars films. Lucas also directed ''Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones'' and ''Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'' which were released in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Numerous critics considered these films inferior to the previously released ''Star Wars'', ''The Empire Strikes Back'', and ''Return of the Jedi''.

In 2008, he reteamed with Spielberg for ''Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull''.

Lucas currently serves as executive producer for ''Star Wars: The Clone Wars'', an animated television series on Cartoon Network, which was preceded by a feature film of the same name. He is also working on a so-far untitled Star Wars live-action series.

For the film ''Red Tails'' (2010), Lucas serves as story-writer and executive producer. He also took over direction of reshoots while director Anthony Hemingway worked on other projects. Lucas is working on his first musical, an untitled CGI project being produced at Skywalker Ranch. Kevin Munroe is directing and David Berenbaum wrote the screenplay.

Awards

In 1991, The George Lucas Educational Foundation was founded as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools. The Foundation's content is available under the brand Edutopia, in an award-winning web site and via documentary films. Lucas, through his foundation, was one of the leading proponents of the E-rate program in the universal service fund, which was enacted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. On June 24, 2008, Lucas testified before the United States House of Representatives subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet as the head of his Foundation to advocate for a free wireless broadband educational network.

The American Film Institute awarded Lucas its Life Achievement Award on June 9, 2005. This was shortly after the release of ''Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'', about which he joked stating that, since he views the entire ''Star Wars'' series as one film, he could actually receive the award now that he had finally "gone back and finished the movie."

On June 5, 2005, Lucas was named among the 100 "Greatest Americans" by the Discovery Channel.

Lucas was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Directing and Writing for ''American Graffiti'', and Best Directing and Writing for ''Star Wars''. He received the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1991. He appeared at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007 with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to present the Best Director award to their friend Martin Scorsese. During the speech, Spielberg and Coppola talked about the joy of winning an Oscar, making fun of Lucas, who has not won a competitive Oscar.

In 2005, Lucas gave US$1 million to help build the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to commemorate American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated $175–180 million to his alma mater to expand the film school. It is the largest single donation to USC and the largest gift to a film school anywhere. Previous donations led to the already existing George Lucas Instructional Building and Marcia Lucas Post-Production building.

On January 1, 2007 George Lucas served as the Grand Marshal for the 2007 Tournament of Roses Parade, and made the coin toss at the 2007 Rose Bowl.

On August 25, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced that Lucas would be one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees in The California Museum's yearlong exhibit. The induction ceremony was on December 1, 2009 in Sacramento, California.

On September 6, 2009, Lucas was in Venice to present to the Pixar team the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the 2009 Biennale Venice Film Festival.

Personal life

In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Academy Award for her editing work on the original ''Star Wars'' film. George and Marcia adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981, and divorced in 1983. Lucas has since adopted two more children: Katie, born in 1988, and Jett, born in 1993. All three of his children have appeared in the three ''Star Wars'' prequels, as has Lucas himself. Lucas had been in a long relationship with and engaged to singer Linda Ronstadt. He has been dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, since 2006 and she has accompanied him to several events including the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, an American Film Institute event in October 2007, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival held in May, and the 2010 Golden Globes.

Lucas was born and raised in a strong Methodist family. The religious and mythical themes in ''Star Wars'' were inspired by Lucas' interest in the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, and he would eventually come to identify strongly with the Eastern religious philosophies he studied and incorporated into his films, which were a major inspiration for "the Force." Lucas eventually came to state that his religion was "Buddhist Methodist". Lucas resides in Marin County.

Lucas has said that he is a fan of Seth MacFarlane's hit TV show ''Family Guy''. MacFarlane has said that Lucasfilm was extremely helpful when the ''Family Guy'' crew wanted to parody their works.

Lucas has pledged to give half of his fortune to charity as part of an effort called The Giving Pledge led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade America's richest individuals to donate their financial wealth to charities.

Filmography

References

Sources

Rinzler, J.W. "The Making of Star Wars, The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film", Ebury Press, 2007.

Silberman, Steve "Life After Darth" Wired, November, 2005

"George Lucas: Interviews" University Press of Mississippi (February 16, 2007)

The Cinema of George Lucas (Hardcover) by Marcus Hearn, Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (March 1, 2005)

Michael Rubin, "Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution" (2005) [ISBN 0937404675]

External links

George Lucas biography at Lucasfilm.com

George Lucas biography at World Business Forum where Lucas is a featured speaker for the 2009 event

Category:1944 births Category:American billionaires Category:American Buddhists Category:American chief executives Category:American Cinema Editors Category:American cinematographers Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American film editors Category:American film producers Category:American science fiction writers Category:American screenwriters Category:American Methodists Category:American voice actors Category:Businesspeople from California Category:Film directors from California Category:Film producers from California Category:Film theorists Category:Disney people * Category:Indiana Jones Category:Living people Category:Mythopoeic writers Category:People from Marin County, California Category:People from Modesto, California Category:Science fiction fans Category:Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductees Category:Special effects people Category:Star Wars Category:University of Southern California alumni

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name	Steven Tyler
background	solo_singer
birth name	Steven Victor Tallarico
alias	"Demon of Screamin'"
birth date	March 26, 1948
birth place	Yonkers, NY, US
instrument	Vocals, harmonica, piano, percussion, maracas, guitar, bass guitar, mandolin, violin, flute, mellotron, hammered dulcimer, accordion, saxophone, trumpet, drums
genre	Hard rock, blues rock, heavy metal
occupation	Singer-songwriter, musician, actor, multi-instrumentalist, talent judge
years active	1964–present
associated acts	Aerosmith, Chain Reaction, The Strangeurs }}

Steven Tyler (born Steven Victor Tallarico on March 26, 1948) is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, best known as the frontman and lead singer of the Boston-based rock band Aerosmith, in which he also plays the harmonica, and occasional piano and percussion. He is the father of actress Liv Tyler. He is also known as the "Demon of Screamin'" and is equally known for his on-stage acrobatics. During his high-energy performances, he usually dresses in bright, colorful outfits with his trademark scarves hanging from his microphone stand. In the 1970s, Tyler rose to prominence as the frontman of Aerosmith, which released such milestone hard rock albums as ''Toys in the Attic'' and ''Rocks''. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tyler had a heavy drug and alcohol addiction, and the band's popularity waned.

He completed drug rehabilitation in 1986 and has subsequently maintained sobriety for over 20 years, aside from an addiction to prescription painkillers in the late 2000s, for which he successfully received treatment in 2009. After Aerosmith launched a remarkable comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the albums ''Permanent Vacation'', ''Pump'', and ''Get a Grip'', Tyler became a household name and has remained a relevant rock icon. As a result, he has since embarked on several solo endeavors including guest appearances on other artists' music as well as film and TV roles (including as a judge on ''American Idol''). However, he has continued to record music and perform with Aerosmith, after more than 41 years in the band. He is included among ''Rolling Stone'''s 100 Greatest Singers. He was also ranked 3rd on ''Hit Parader'''s Top 100 Metal Vocalists of All Time. In 2001 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Aerosmith, and he was the presenter when AC/DC was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.

Early life

Steven Victor Tallarico was born March 26, 1948 in Yonkers, New York, the son of Susan (née Blancha), a secretary, and Victor A. Tallarico, a classical musician and pianist. His father was of Italian and German descent and his mother was of Polish, Russian and English ancestry (his maternal grandfather had changed his surname from "Czarnyszewicz" to "Blancha"). Tyler has stated that he grew up "under his father's piano", and that from what his father played, he got "that emotional thing" that he has with music. When he was sixteen, he formed his first band, called The Strangeurs, later changed to Chain Reaction, where he was the drummer, and later the lead singer. Tyler also had been part of a few local bands, like William Proud and The Left Banke. He was expelled from Roosevelt High School due to his drug use. He graduated from the Leonard Quintano for Young Professionals School in 1967. He attended Woodstock with Joe Perry and Joey Kramer, his future Aerosmith bandmates.

Career

Formation and success of Aerosmith (1970–1978)

Before Aerosmith was formed, Tyler wrote what would become one of Aerosmith's signature songs, "Dream On". In 1969, Tyler attended a local rock show in Sunapee, New Hampshire where he first saw future band-mates Joe Perry (guitars) and Tom Hamilton (Bass), who at the time were playing in a band called the Jam Band. Tyler later stated he was struck by their raw power and attitude. Around 1970, Tyler, Perry, and Hamilton decided to form a band. However, Tyler, who had typically performed drums in many of his previous bands, insisted that he be the frontman and lead singer of this band. Joey Kramer, a friend of Tyler's from New York, was recruited to play drums. They also added Tyler's boyhood friend Ray Tabano as a second guitarist. The band moved to Boston and shared a small apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton. Tabano was replaced by Brad Whitford in 1971.

After spending time on the Boston club circuit under the tutelage of their first manager, Frank Connelly, the band began working with New York managers Steve Leber and David Krebs. Leber describes the band as "the closest thing I've ever seen to the Rolling Stones." On October, 1971, the managers arranged the gig at the legendary nightclub Max's Kansas City to showcase the group to record company executives. They subsequently signed a record deal with Columbia Records in 1971 and released their eponymous debut album in 1973. This was followed by ''Get Your Wings'' in 1974. Around this time, Aerosmith continued to tour wherever they could, and opened for bands like Mott the Hoople. The band had a minor hit in "Dream On", which peaked at No.59 in 1973, but it wasn't until the back-to-back releases of ''Toys in the Attic'' (1975) and ''Rocks'' (1976) that Aerosmith broke into the mainstream. In 1975, they achieved their first Top 40 hit in "Sweet Emotion". Soon after, "Dream On" was re-released and hit No. 6 in 1976, followed by another Top 10 hit "Walk This Way". Additionally, ''Rocks'' produced the hit singles "Last Child", "Back in the Saddle", and "Home Tonight". By 1976, Aerosmith found themselves headlining huge stadiums and major rock music festivals. That year, Tyler emerged as a prominent rock star and sex symbol in his own right, gracing the cover of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine. 1977's ''Draw the Line'' continued the band's success, and they were catapulted to international fame and recognition, launching tours in Europe and Japan. A series of Hot 100 hits continued throughout the remainder of the decade, including "Draw the Line", "Kings and Queens", and "Chip Away the Stone". Aerosmith's first five albums have also all since gone multi-platinum, and all five are considered to be among the greatest hard rock albums of all time. Aerosmith toured heavily throughout the mid to late 1970s, and their live shows during this time period were captured through 1978's live album ''Live Bootleg!'' and the 1989 VHS release ''Live Texxas Jam '78''. 1978 also saw Tyler make his acting debut as the leader of The Future Villain Band in the film ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'', alongside his fellow Aerosmith band-mates. The film also spawned Aerosmith's cover of the Beatles hit "Come Together", which would be Aerosmith's last Top 40 single for nine years.

Decline of Aerosmith (1979–1983)

As the decade wore on, the fast-paced life of touring, recording, living together, and using drugs began to take its toll on the band. Tyler and Perry often were called the Toxic Twins for their legendary intake of stimulants and heroin. Their relationship is well documented in many of Aerosmith's video releases as well as in the Aerosmith ''Behind the Music''. On July 28, 1979, after a huge fight at a concert in Cleveland, Perry left Aerosmith to begin his own band, The Joe Perry Project. ''Night in the Ruts'' was released that fall, and Aerosmith forged on with new guitarist Jimmy Crespo. In the fall of 1980, Tyler was injured in a serious motorcycle crash that left him hospitalized for two months and unable to tour or record for much of 1981. When the band re-convened to begin recording, Tyler formed a writing partnership with Crespo, co-writing and producing the album ''Rock in a Hard Place'' (1982). Brad Whitford had left in 1981, shortly after recording the guitar parts for the album's lead single, "Lightning Strikes". Whitford was replaced by Rick Dufay, and the band continued to tour into 1983. Tyler's drug abuse increasingly became problematic, and he collapsed on-stage.

Reuniting and getting clean (1984–1986)

On February 14, 1984, Perry and Whitford, who left the band in 1979 and 1981 respectively, showed up at an Aerosmith show. According to the band's ''Behind the Music'' special on VH1, Tyler alleges he made the first phone call to Perry encouraging them to meet up again. Backstage, they all met, and Perry and Whitford agreed to join the band once again. With the new reunion, the band also fired their managers Leber and Krebs, hired new manager Tim Collins (who was managing Joe Perry) and signed a new record contract with Geffen Records.

Aerosmith embarked on a reunion tour, the "Back in the Saddle Tour", and proceeded to record once again, releasing ''Done with Mirrors'' in 1985. The band was still using drugs, however, especially Tyler, who collapsed at a show in Springfield, Illinois, on the 1984 tour. In 1986, the band held a meeting in which the band members staged an intervention on Tyler and convinced him to enter a drug rehabilitation program.

After Tyler had successfully completed rehab, every other member of Aerosmith eventually followed suit; all had successfully exited their respective programs at various times in the mid-late 1980s.

Comeback and superstardom (1986–1999)

Aerosmith rose to prominence again when Tyler and Perry appeared on Run–D.M.C.'s cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" in 1986, a track that combined elements of hip-hop and rock, that broke down the barriers between the two genres, broke rap into the mainstream, and introduced Aerosmith to a new generation. The track hit No.4 on the charts and launched a famous music video that saw heavy rotation. This paved the way for Aerosmith to mount a significant comeback. Tyler and Perry renewed their songwriting partnership but were now also working with outside songwriting collaborators brought in by the record company, like Desmond Child and Jim Vallance. In addition, to help give Aerosmith a slick sound that would be accessible to mainstream audiences, they were receiving help from producer Bruce Fairbairn and A&R; man John Kalodner. Aerosmith released ''Permanent Vacation'' in 1987, which became a huge multi-platinum success and launched three Top 20 hits ("Dude (Looks Like a Lady)", "Angel", and "Rag Doll"). The band launched a tour with the emerging Guns N' Roses opening many shows. ''Permanent Vacation'' was followed by 1989's ''Pump'', which was even more successful, selling 7 million copies and producing three Top 10 hits ("Love in an Elevator", "Janie's Got a Gun", and "What it Takes") and one Top 40 hit ("The Other Side"). ''Pump'' in particular saw Tyler expand his musical horizons, co-writing the innovative hit "Janie's Got a Gun", which won the band their first Grammy award. The band toured with many up-and-coming acts and performed in locations like Australia for the first time. In the late 1980s, Tyler also guested on albums by comedian Sam Kinison, Alice Cooper (a fellow 70s rocker also launching a successful comeback) and popular contemporaries Mötley Crüe. Around that time, Tyler and Perry also appeared at a Bon Jovi concert in Milton Keynes and performed "Walk This Way".

With the twin successes of ''Permanent Vacation'' and ''Pump'', the band became an MTV sensation and Tyler became a household name. The band were featured on a "Wayne's World" sketch on ''Saturday Night Live'' in 1990, which is ranked as the No.1 moment of all time on the show. That same year, Aerosmith recorded one of the first episodes of ''MTV Unplugged''. In 1991, Aerosmith was one of the first bands to be featured on ''The Simpsons''. That year, the band also signed a $30 million record deal with their old label Columbia, which they would begin recording for later that decade. The box set ''Pandora's Box'' was released by Columbia in late 1991, and the band filmed a music video for "Sweet Emotion" to promote the release. Earlier in the year, the band also performed "Dream On" with an orchestra at MTV's 10th Anniversary celebration; their filmed performance was used as the official video for the song. After a brief break, the band returned to the studio in 1992 to record their next album. The band's A&R; man John Kalodner criticized some of the early material being considered for this album, targeting Tyler's sexually profane lyrics in particular. As Tyler was no longer using drugs, some members of the band and their management had believed Tyler had now become a sex addict. thumb|left|150px|Steven Tyler performing on the Get a Grip Tour in 1993. However, the band eventually began recording again and released ''Get a Grip'' in 1993, which became their most successful album worldwide, selling over 15 million copies and producing a series of hit singles ("Livin' on the Edge", "Cryin'", "Amazing", "Crazy"). While the album saw mixed reviews and received some criticism for over-using outside collaborators, Aerosmith won more awards during this time than any other, winning two Grammy Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, two American Music Awards, a People's Choice award, and a Billboard Award. The band became well-known for their videos at this time, which featured film-like storylines and up-and-coming actors and actresses like Edward Furlong, Stephen Dorff, Jason London, Josh Holloway, and most notably Alicia Silverstone. Tyler's daughter Liv made her acting debut in the band's video for "Crazy" in 1994. The band also launched their biggest and most extensive tour yet, performing over 240 shows in nearly 30 countries, including touring Latin America for the first time and performing in many European countries for the first time.

After the 18-month long Get a Grip Tour ended in December 1994, the band took a break in 1995 to spend time with their families. This break was needed due to the grueling lifestyle of the previous 10 years under the helm of manager Tim Collins, who helped orchestrate much of the band's comeback and sustained success. Tyler and Perry also began writing for a new album, and the band performed a couple one-off shows in Boston to try out the new material, and vacationed together with their families in Florida. Aerosmith, however, almost broke up after the band's manager spread rumors that band members were saying bad things about each other and that Tyler was being unfaithful to his wife and using drugs again during recording sessions in Miami. The band subsequently fired Collins in 1996 in the middle of recording for their next album. In 1997, they released ''Nine Lives'', which went double platinum, launched three hits ("Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)", "Hole in My Soul", and "Pink"), and won the band their fourth Grammy for "Pink". They toured for over two years in support of the album. In 1997, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were featured in a commercial for the Gap. That fall, the band's tell-all autobiography was released.

In 1998, while on tour in support of ''Nine Lives'', Tyler suffered a ligament injury when his mic stand came crashing into his knee. Tyler and the band finished the show, but they had to cancel several dates, and Tyler had to wear a leg cast while filming the video for "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing". The song was the band's first No.1 hit and the only song to date by a rock band to debut at No.1 on the Hot 100. It has since become a slow-dance staple, and at the time introduced Aerosmith and Steven Tyler to yet another new generation. The song was written for the film ''Armageddon'', which featured Tyler's daughter Liv.

In 1999, Tyler and Perry joined Kid Rock and Run–D.M.C. to perform "Walk This Way" at the MTV Video Music Awards. Earlier that year, the band saw the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith open at Walt Disney World.

Continued success and touring (2000–08)

In 2001, Aerosmith played at the Super Bowl XXXV Halftime Show and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band also released the album ''Just Push Play'', which featured the Top 10 hit "Jaded". The band went on tour again in the summer of 2001, and since then Aerosmith has toured every year, except 2008. After the September 11 attacks, the band performed at the benefit concert "United We Stand" in Washington, D.C. Tyler donned a full-length jacket featuring the American flag, and the band performed a brief set including "Livin' on the Edge", "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", "Just Push Play", and "Walk This Way". The band flew back to Indianapolis to perform a show that same night.

In 2002, Aerosmith's two-hour long ''Behind the Music'' was released, chronicling the band's tumultuous history and current activities and touring. They were also honored as MTV Icons. In the summer, they released the compilation ''O, Yeah! The Ultimate Aerosmith Hits'', which went double platinum and included the new track "Girls of Summer", which spawned a namesake tour with Kid Rock and Run–D.M.C. opening.

In 2003, Tyler received an honorary degree from Berklee College of Music, and, in 2005, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2003, Tyler also inducted AC/DC into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Tyler sang with AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson for a performance of "You Shook Me All Night Long". Later in the year, Tyler went on tour with Aerosmith for the Rocksimus Maximus Tour with KISS.

In 2004, Aerosmith released the blues cover album ''Honkin' on Bobo'' and launched a brief tour with Cheap Trick, focused on smaller markets. That summer, Tyler starred in a commercial for Sony's Cyber-shot camera, which also included the Aerosmith song "The Grind", a new song featured on ''Honkin' on Bobo''. Later that year, Tyler sang the National Anthem to kick off the 2004 World Series at Fenway Park. The 2004 film ''The Polar Express'' featured Tyler singing "Rockin' on Top of the World" alongside a group of computer-animated elves resembling Aerosmith.

In 2005, Tyler sang lead vocals on Santana's hit single "Just Feel Better" and made a cameo appearance in the film ''Be Cool''.

In 2006, after recovering from throat surgery and the grueling Rockin' the Joint Tour, Steven Tyler performed with Joe Perry and the Boston Pops Orchestra for the orchestra's annual Fourth of July concert, his first major public appearance since the surgery. During the concert, which was broadcast nationally on CBS, Tyler, Perry, and the orchestra performed a medley of "Walk This Way", "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" and "Dream On". That year, Tyler also recorded a duet with country music artist Keith Anderson, titled "Three Chord Country and American Rock & Roll". The song, a remixed version of a song found on Anderson's debut album, was released as a single on the U.S. Hot Country Songs charts.

Later that year, the Aerosmith compilation ''Devil's Got a New Disguise'' was released, which included two new tracks. Tyler hit the road with Aerosmith again for the Route of All Evil Tour with Mötley Crüe and also made several more public appearances. He made a cameo appearance on the sitcom ''Two and a Half Men'', playing himself. On October 14, 2006, Tyler sang "God Bless America" during the seventh inning stretch at Game No.3 of the National League Championship Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. On November 24, he volunteered by serving Thanksgiving dinner to the needy at a restaurant in West Palm Beach, Florida, before an Aerosmith show there.

In 2007, Tyler kept active in Aerosmith with the band's world tour which saw them perform in 19 countries. Also that year, Tyler and daughter Liv were profiled on ''E! True Hollywood Story.

On May 21, 2008, Tyler checked into Las Encinas Hospital rehabilitation clinic in Pasadena, California, to recover from multiple leg surgeries. He made a public statement saying that "The 'foot repair' pain was intense, greater than I'd anticipated. The months of rehabilitative care and the painful strain of physical therapy were traumatic. I really needed a safe environment to recuperate where I could shut off my phone and get back on my feet." In June 2008, ''Guitar Hero: Aerosmith'' was released, the franchise's first video game based solely around one band and the most successful game based around a band. On July 14, 2008, Tyler's mother, Susan Rey Tallarico, died at the age of 84. On July 18, 2008, Steven Tyler appeared with Billy Joel at the last concert to be played at Shea Stadium. Backed by Joel's band, he sang lead vocals on "Walk This Way". In August 2008 HarperCollins won an auction to publish Tyler's autobiography. That same month, Tyler performed with trumpeter Chris Botti in Boston. In December 2008, Tyler made a surprise appearance at the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts at Nassau Coliseum (December 12, 2008) and the Izod Center (December 13, 2008). At the Izod Center, he collaborated with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on "Dream On" and "Sweet Emotion".

Recent events (2009–present)

On August 5, 2009, while on the Guitar Hero Aerosmith Tour, Tyler fell off a stage near Sturgis, South Dakota, injuring his head and neck and breaking his shoulder. He was airlifted to Rapid City Regional Hospital. Aerosmith was forced to cancel the rest of their 2009 tour, except for two shows in Hawaii in October. Back in 2007, Aerosmith had to cancel their first concert in Maui, which resulted in a class action lawsuit involving 8,000 plaintiffs. Attendees received tickets and, in some cases, reimbursements for out of pocket expenses. The band also performed in early November at an auto race in Abu Dhabi.

On November 9, 2009, it was reported that Steven Tyler had no contact with the other members of Aerosmith and that they were unsure if he was still in the band. On November 10, 2009, Joe Perry confirmed that Steven Tyler had quit Aerosmith to pursue a solo career and was unsure whether the move was indefinite. No replacement was announced. Despite rumors of leaving the band, and notwithstanding Perry's comment as reported earlier the same day, Tyler joined The Joe Perry Project onstage November 10, 2009, at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza and performed "Walk This Way." According to sources at the event, Tyler assured the crowd that despite rumors to the contrary, he is "not quitting Aerosmith." On December 22, 2009, ''Rolling Stone'' reported that Tyler had checked into rehab for pain management.

In 2010, Steven Tyler embarked on the Cocked, Locked, Ready to Rock Tour with Aerosmith, which saw them perform over 40 concerts in 18 countries. On September 16, 2010, it was reported that Tyler would have his first solo project. He wrote "Love Lives", which serves as a theme song for the Japanese sci-fi movie ''Space Battleship Yamato''. The song was based on the English translated script, as well as on some clips of the film itself. The single was released on November 24, a week before the movie was released. A preview of the single can be heard in the movie's trailers. On September 22, 2010, Fox confirmed that Tyler would join ''American Idol'' as a member of the judging panel for the program's tenth season, alongside Randy Jackson and Jennifer Lopez. In December 2010, Tyler performed at the Kennedy Center Honors, honoring Paul McCartney by performing several tracks from ''Abbey Road''.

On January 19, 2011, Tyler made his debut appearance as a judge on ''American Idol'', during the premiere of the show's tenth season, which aired through the end of May. On April 2, 2011, Tyler presented an award at the 2011 Kids' Choice Awards. The following day, Steven Tyler performed with Carrie Underwood at the Academy of Country Music Awards. Underwood and Tyler performed Underwood's song "Undo It" and completed their segment with an energetic version of the Aerosmith classic "Walk This Way". On May 3, 2011, Tyler released his autobiography ''Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?'' The book was accompanied by the new single "(It) Feels So Good", released May 10. The single reached #35 on the Billboard Hot 100. In addition, during breaks in between ''Idol'', Tyler worked on new material for Aerosmith's next studio album. Tyler performed the Aerosmith song "Dream On" on the season finale of ''American Idol'' on May 25.

In August 2011, it was announced that Tyler would be the inspiration for Andy Hilfiger's new fashion line, Andrew Charles. In addition to serving as the inspiration for all menswear, Steven and his daughter, Chelsea Tyler, will appear in the line's advertising campaign. Steven is also developing a signature scarf collection called "Rock Scarf" for Andrew Charles. Both the Andrew Charles collection and the Rock Scarf line will be exclusively available in select Macy's stores and on macys.com starting September of 2011.

Tyler is currently working with the other members of Aerosmith on the band's next studio album. After finishing up in the studio, the band will tour Latin America and Japan in the fall of 2011. In addition, Tyler has confirmed he will be on season 11 of ''American Idol'' which is set to air in January 2012.

Dirico Motorcycles (formerly Red Wing Motorcycles)

On September 15, 2007, at New Hampshire International Speedway, Steven announced the launch of Dirico Motorcycles (formerly Red Wing Motorcycles). Dirico's bikes are designed by Steven Tyler, engineered by Mark Dirico, and built by AC Custom Motorcycles in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Steven has been a long time motorcycle fan and riding enthusiast. About the new Dirico Motorcycles, Tyler said, “You get on one of these bikes and you can ride for days. These bikes are slick, rugged, and just damn cool. And they’re amazing to look at.”

Steven Tyler also participates in a variety of charity auctions involving motorcycles, including the Ride for Children charity.

Steven is also friends with Paul Teutul from American Chopper fame

Personal life

Family and relationships

In 1975, Tyler convinced the parents of 16 year old groupie Julia Holcomb (sometimes spelled Holcolm) to sign over guardianship to him so that he could live with her in Boston. They dated and did drugs together for three years. Holcomb was referred to as "Diana Hall" by the editor of the Aerosmith autobiography ''Walk This Way'' in an attempt to conceal her identity, but other sources have confirmed her identity. Pressures leading to their split included both their age difference (Tyler was 27 when they first met), a house fire, and a pregnancy that resulted in an abortion. Band member Ray Tabano wrote in ''Walk This Way'' that the abortion "really messed Steven up" because the child was a boy. Tyler wrote, "It was a big crisis. It's a major thing when you're growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives...You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I'm going, Jesus, what have I done?"

After returning Holcomb to her parents, Tyler had a brief relationship with fashion model Bebe Buell, during which he fathered actress Liv Tyler (Buell initially claimed that the father was Todd Rundgren to protect her daughter from Tyler's drug addiction).

In 1978, he married Cyrinda Foxe, from daughter Liv's marriage to British musician Royston Langdon from the band Spacehog.

On May 28, 1988, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tyler married clothing designer Teresa Barrick. A statement from Tyler's publicist read in part, "Despite Aerosmith's desire to keep the tour going as long as possible, [Tyler's] doctors advised him not to continue performing to give his voice time to recover." Aerosmith's remaining North American tour dates in 2006 on the Rockin' the Joint Tour were subsequently canceled.

The surgery, to correct a popped blood vessel in his throat, was a success. In the words of Tyler: "He just took a laser and zapped the blood vessel." After a few weeks of rest, Tyler and the rest of Aerosmith entered the studio on May 20, 2006 to begin work on their new album.

On July 3–4, 2006, Tyler and Joe Perry performed at the Boston Waterfront with the Boston Pops Orchestra and sang the songs "Dream On", "Walk This Way", and "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" as part of the Boston July 4 Fireworks Spectacular. The concert was notable as Tyler's first public performance since the surgery. A tour launched later in fall 2006 with Mötley Crüe, titled the Route of All Evil Tour.

Steven Tyler's throat surgery was featured in 2007 on an episode of the National Geographic Channel series, ''Incredible Human Machine''.

Hepatitis C

In a September 2006 interview with ''Access Hollywood'', Steven Tyler revealed that he had been suffering from Hepatitis C for the past 11 years. He was diagnosed with the disease in 2003 and had undergone extensive treatment from 2003–2006, including 11 months of interferon therapy, which he said was "agony".

Discography

With Aerosmith

Collaborative work

Year	!Song	!Artist	!Album
	"Walk This Way"	Run-D.M.C. featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry
		Sam Kinison; guest performers include Steven Tyler	''Have You Seen Me Lately?''
	Various tracks	Alice Cooper; guest performers include Steven Tyler
	"Slice of Your Pie"	Mötley Crüe; guest performers include Steven Tyler
	"Sticky Sweet"	Mötley Crüe; guest performers include Steven Tyler	''Dr. Feelgood''
	"Roots, Rock, Reggae"	Bob Marley featuring Steven Tyler	''Chant Down Babylon''
	"Misery"		''Missundaztood''
	"Sing for the Moment"	Eminem featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry (uncredited; Dream On sample used; New recording not done)	''The Eminem Show''
	"I'm a King Bee"	Steven Tyler and Joe Perry	''Lightning in a Bottle Soundtrack''
	"Just Feel Better"
	"Three Chord Country and American Rock & Roll"	Keith Anderson featuring Steven Tyler	''Three Chord Country and American Rock & Roll''
	"Cryin'" and "Smile"	Chris Botti featuring Steven Tyler	''Chris Botti in Boston''

Solo work

Year	Single	Chart Positions
!width=45
2010		–
2011		35

Filmography

{|class="wikitable" style="font-size: 95%;" border="2" cellpadding="4" background: #f9f9f9; |- align="center" ! style="background:#B0C4DE;" | Year ! style="background:#B0C4DE;" | Film ! style="background:#B0C4DE;" | Role |- | 1978 || ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' || Member of the Future Villain Band |- | 1988 || ''The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years'' || Himself |- | 1990 || ''Saturday Night Live'': Musical guest; "Wayne's World" sketch || Himself |- | 1991 || ''The Simpsons'': "Flaming Moe's" episode || Himself (voice) |- | 1993 || ''Wayne's World 2'' || Himself |- | 1993 || ''Saturday Night Live'': Musical guest; "Bad Dancer" sketch || Himself |- | 1997 || ''Saturday Night Live'': Musical guest; "Mary Katherine Gallagher" sketch || Himself |- | 1999 || ''Clubland'' || David Foster |- | 2001 || ''Saturday Night Live'': Musical guest || Himself |- | 2003 || Lizzie McGuire||Father Christmas/Himself |- | 2004 || ''The Polar Express'' || Elf Lieutenant / Elf Singer |- | 2004 || ''Goodnight Joseph Parker'' || Sammy |- | 2005 || ''Be Cool'' || Himself |- | 2006 || ''Two and a Half Men'': two episodes || Himself |- | 2009 || ''Chris Botti in Boston'' || Himself |- | 2011 || ''American Idol'' || Talent Judge (Himself) |}

Awards and nominations

See also

Toxic Twins

References

External links

Category:1948 births Category:Aerosmith members Category:People of Calabrian descent Category:American musicians of Italian descent Category:American musicians of German descent Category:American musicians of Polish descent Category:American musicians of Russian descent Category:American musicians of English descent Category:American male singers Category:American rock singers Category:American heavy metal singers Category:American tenors Category:Berklee College of Music alumni Category:English-language singers Category:Idol series judges Category:Living people Category:Musicians from New York Category:People from Yonkers, New York Category:People self-identifying as substance abusers

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