Sleeping Beauty is a 1959 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and based on the fairy tale "La Belle au bois dormant" by Charles Perrault. The 16th animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, it was released to theatres on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution, and is the last fairy tale produced by Walt Disney (after his death, the studio returned to the genre with 1989's The Little Mermaid) due to its initial box office disappointment.

The film was directed by Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman, under the supervision of Clyde Geronimi, with additional story work by Joe Rinaldi, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Ralph Wright, and Milt Banta. The film's musical score and songs, featuring the work of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, are arrangements or adaptations of numbers from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Sleeping Beauty was the first animated film to be photographed in the Technirama widescreen process. The film was presented in Super Technirama 70 and 6-channel stereophonic sound in first-run engagements. Only one other animated film, Disney's The Black Cauldron, was shot in Technirama.

Plot[link]

Through a textual prologue told via a stop-motion storybook. After many childless years, King Stefan and his Queen welcome the arrival of their daughter, Aurora and proclaim a holiday for the high and low estate to pay homage to the princess. At the gathering of the christening by everyone in the kingdom, she is betrothed to Prince Phillip, the young son of King Hubert, so that the kingdoms of Stefan and Hubert will be forever united. Also attending are the three good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, who have come to bless the child with gifts. The first fairy, Flora, gives the princess the gift of beauty, while the next fairy, Fauna, gives her the gift of song. Before Merryweather is able to give her blessing, a wicked fairy named Maleficent appears and pretends to be gracious about her having been left out. The evil fairy then curses the princess, proclaiming that before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Merryweather is able to use her blessing to weaken the curse, so that instead of death, Aurora will fall asleep from which she can be awakened by True love's kiss. Though King Stefan orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom to be burned, the three fairies know Maleficent's spell cannot be stopped that easily and devise a plan to protect her. They disguise themselves as peasant women and with the King and Queen's consent they sneak Aurora away with them to a woodcutter's cottage in the forest until her sixteen birthday passes.

Years later, Aurora, renamed Briar Rose, has grown into a beautiful young woman with the blessings that Flora and Fauna bestowed to her. Sweet and gentle, she dreams of falling in love one day. On her sixteenth birthday, the three fairies ask Rose to gather berries in the forest so they can prepare a surprise party for her. While singing in the forest, Rose attracts the attention of Prince Phillip, now a handsome young man, as he is out riding his horse, Samson. When they meet, they instantly fall in love. Realizing that she has to return home, Rose flees from Phillip without ever learning his name, but asks him to come to her cottage that evening. While she is away, the fairies' magical preparations draw the attention of Maleficent's pet raven, revealing the location of the long-missing Aurora. Back at home, the fairies tell Rose the truth and escort the now-heartbroken princess back to her parents. Meanwhile, Phillip tells his father of a peasant girl he met and wishes to marry in spite of his prearranged marriage to Princess Aurora. King Hubert tries to convince Phillip to marry the princess instead of the peasant girl, but fails.

In a room within the palace, Maleficent lures Aurora away from the fairies through a secret entrance behind a fireplace and up a staircase to an empty room, where an enchanted spinning wheel awaits her. Aurora touches the spindle, pricking her finger and completing the curse. The good fairies place Aurora on a bed in the highest tower and place a powerful charm on all the people in the kingdom, causing them to fall in a deep sleep until the spell is broken. Before falling asleep, King Hubert tells Stefan of his son being in love with a peasant girl. The fairies realize that Prince Phillip is the man with whom Aurora has fallen in love. However, Prince Phillip, arriving at the peasant girl's home, is kidnapped by Maleficent and her minions to prevent him from breaking her spell.

The fairies discover Phillip's hunting cap in the ravaged woodcutter's cottage and realise that Maleficant has taken Phillip hostage. They then journey to the Forbidden Mountain and sneak into Maleficent's castle to rescue him. They follow Maleficant to the dungeon where she converses with Phillip and then leaves. They enter the chamber and arm the prince with the magical Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue. Phillip and the fairies then escape from the prison cell and encounter Maleficant's minions who try to stop Phillip from escaping. After their failed attempts with help by the fairies, Maleficent surrounds Stefan's castle with a forest of thorns, but when that fails to stop Phillip, Maleficent transforms into a gigantic dragon to battle the prince herself. Ultimately, Phillip throws the sword, blessed by the fairies' magic, directly into Maleficent's heart, causing Maleficent to fall to her death from a cliff.

Phillip enters the castle and up the the highest tower to awaken Aurora with a kiss. The spell over her is broken and everyone else in the castle also awakens too. The royal couple descends to the ballroom, where Aurora is happily reunited with her parents, and she and Prince Phillip live happily ever after.

Cast[link]

• Mary Costa as Princess Aurora/Sleeping Beauty
• Eleanor Audley as Maleficent
• Verna Felton as Flora and Queen Leah
• Barbara Jo Allen as Fauna
• Barbara Luddy as Merryweather
• Bill Shirley as Prince Phillip
• Taylor Holmes as King Stefan
• Bill Thompson as King Hubert
• Marvin Miller as The Narrator
• Candy Candido, Pinto Colvig, and Bill Amsbery as Maleficent's Goons
• Dallas McKennon as The Owl

Production[link]

Overview and art direction[link]

Sleeping Beauty spent nearly the entire decade of the 1950s in production: the story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, animation production took from 1953 until 1958, and the stereophonic musical score, mostly based on Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same name, was recorded in 1957. The film holds a notable position in Disney animation as the last Disney animated film to use hand-inked cels. Beginning with the next feature, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney would move to the use of xerography to transfer animators' drawings from paper to celluloid. Its art, which Walt Disney wanted to look like a living illustration and which was inspired by medieval art, was not in the typical Disney style. Because the Disney studio had already made two features based on fairy tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950), Walt Disney wanted this film to stand out from its predecessors by choosing a different visual style. The movie eschewed the soft, rounded look of earlier Disney features for a more stylized one. Since Super Technirama 70 was used, it also meant the backgrounds could contain more detailed and complex artwork than ever used in an animated film before.

While Disney's regular production designer, Ken Anderson was in charge of the film's overall look, Disney artist Eyvind Earle was made the film's color stylist and chief background designer, and Disney gave him a significant amount of freedom in designing the settings and selecting colors for the film. Earle also painted the majority of the backgrounds himself. The elaborate paintings usually took seven to ten days to paint; by contrast, a typical animation background took only one workday to complete. Disney's decision to give Earle so much artistic freedom was not popular among the Disney animators, who had until Sleeping Beauty exercised some influence over the style of their characters and settings.

It was also the first time the studio experimented with the Xerox process. Woolie Reitherman used it on the dragon as a way to enlarge and reduce its size, but due to the primitive equipment available in this early test, the Xerox lines were then replaced with traditional ink and paint.^[3]

Chuck Jones, who gained fame as an animation director with Warner Bros. Animation, did some work on the film. He worked with the studio during a brief period when Warner Bros. closed its Animation department, anticipating that 3-D film would replace animation as a box office draw. When the studio was re-opened following the failure of 3-D, Jones ended his work at Disney and returned to Warner Bros. His work on Sleeping Beauty, which he spent four months on, remained uncredited. Ironically, during his early years at WB, Jones was a heavy user of Disney-style animation.

Characters and story development[link]

The name given to the princess by her royal birth parents is "Aurora" (Latin for "dawn"), as it was in the original Tchaikovsky ballet. This name occurred in Perrault's version as well, not as the princess's name, but as her daughter's.^[4] In hiding, she is called Briar Rose, the name of the princess in the Brothers Grimm variant.^[5] Ironically, Princess Aurora, the film's titular character, appears for fewer than eighteen minutes in the film (excluding the time she appears as an infant at the beginning). The prince was given the princely name most familiar to Americans in the 1950s: "Prince Phillip", named after Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The evil fairy was aptly named Maleficent (a Latin-derived adjective meaning "harmfully malicious").^[6] Sleeping Beauty's mother is never named in the film itself or the character reference sheets but according to Disney legend around the studio she was meant to be called Queen Leah, but is otherwise always referred to as "the queen," whereas both her father and that of the prince are given names that are used several times, both in dialogue and narration.

Walt Disney had suggested that all three good fairies should look alike, but veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston objected, saying that three identical fairies would not be exciting. They chose to have the fairies in different personalities, looks, and colours just like the famed Disney duck trio Huey, Dewey and Louie. Additionally, the idea originally included seven good fairies instead of three, as there are seven good fairies in the story's main reference, Perrault's version. In determining Maleficent's design, standard depictions of witches and hags were dismissed (as it would too closely resembled the Wicked Queen's guise in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) for animator Marc Davis opted for a more elegant look. In his research of the period and artwork of the Medieval times he came across a picture of a woman of a religious nature but was dressed elegantly devilish with flowing capes and clothes resembling flames. With this image in his head he centered around the appearance of flames, ultimately crowning the villain with "the horns of the devil." He even went as far as to give Maleficent bat-looking wings for her collar. In the final production the individual character of the three good fairies and the elegant villain proved to be among the film's strongest points.

Several story points for this film came from discarded ideas for Disney's previous fairy tale involving a sleeping heroine: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They include Maleficent's capture of the Prince, as well as her mocking him and the Prince's daring escape from her castle. Disney discarded these ideas from Snow White because his artists were not able to draw a human male believably enough at the time^{[citation needed]}, although they were incorporated into the comic book version of the film. Also discarded from Snow White but used in this film were the ideas of the dance with the makeshift prince (also used as "Prince Buckethead" in the Snow White comic book), and the fantasy sequence of the prince and princess dancing in the clouds, which was also considered but dropped from Cinderella.

Live-action reference footage[link]

Before animation production began, every shot in the film was done in a live-action reference version, with live actors in costume serving as models for the animators. The role of Prince Phillip was modeled by Ed Kemmer, who had played Commander Buzz Corry on television's Space Patrol five years before Sleeping Beauty was released. For the final battle sequence, Kemmer was photographed on a wooden buck. Among the actresses who performed in reference footage for this film were Spring Byington, Frances Bavier, and Helene Stanley.

Helene Stanley was the live action reference for Princess Aurora. The only known surviving footage of Stanley as Aurora's live-action reference is a clip from the television program Disneyland, which consists of the artists sketching her dancing with the woodland animals. It was not the first or last time Stanley worked for Disney; she also provided live-action references for Cinderella and Anita from 101 Dalamatians,^[7] and portrayed Polly Crockett for the TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. An episode of The Mickey Mouse Club television series features Stanley re-enacting scenes from the Sleeping Beauty for the Mousketeers to watch (a clip from this episode is included as a special feature on the Cinderella Platinum Edition DVD).

All the live actors' performances were screened for the animators' reference as Walt Disney insisted that much of Sleeping Beauty's character animation be as close to live action as possible.^[8]

Release and later history[link]

Theatrical release[link]

Disney's distribution arm, Buena Vista Distribution, originally released Sleeping Beauty to theaters in both standard 35mm prints and large-format 70mm prints. The Super Technirama 70 prints were equipped with six-track stereophonic sound; some CinemaScope-compatible 35mm Technirama prints were released in four-track stereo, and others had monaural soundtracks. On the initial run, Sleeping Beauty was paired with the short musical/documentary film Grand Canyon which won an Academy Award.

During its original release in 1959, Sleeping Beauty earned approximately $7.7 million in box office rentals.^[9] Sleeping Beauty's production costs, which totaled $6 million,^[1] made it the most expensive Disney film up to that point, and over twice as expensive as each of the preceding three Disney animated features: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp.^[10] The high production costs of Sleeping Beauty, coupled with the underperformance of much of the rest of Disney's 1959-1960 release slate resulted in the company posting its first annual loss in a decade for fiscal year 1960,^[1] and massive layoffs were done throughout the animation department.^[11]

The film was met with mixed reviews from critics, often citing the film being slowly paced and having little character development.^[8] Nevertheless, the film has sustained a strong following and is today hailed as one of the best animated features ever made, thanks to its stylized designs by painter Eyvind Earle who also was the art director for the movie, its lush music score and its large-format widescreen and stereophonic sound presentation.

Like Alice in Wonderland, which was not initially successful either, Sleeping Beauty was never re-released theatrically in Walt Disney's lifetime. However, it had many re-releases in theaters over the decades. The film was re-released theatrically in 1970, 1979 (in 70mm 6 channel stereo, as well as in 35 mm stereo and mono), 1986, 1993, and 1995. Sleeping Beauty's successful reissues have made it the second most successful film released in 1959, second to Ben-Hur,^[12] with a lifetime gross of $51.6 million.^[2] When adjusted for ticket price inflation, the domestic total gross comes out to $478.22 million, placing it in the top 30 of films.^[13]

Home video release[link]

Sleeping Beauty was released on VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc in 1986 in the Classics collection, becoming the first Disney Classics video to be digitally processed in Hi-Fi stereo. The film underwent a digital restoration in 1997, and that version was released to both VHS and Laserdisc again as part of the Masterpiece Collection. The 1997 VHS edition also came with a special commemorative booklet included, with brief facts on the making of the movie. In 2003, the restored Sleeping Beauty was released to DVD in a 2-disc "Special Edition" which included both a widescreen version (formatted at 2.35:1) and a pan and scan version as well.

A 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition release of Sleeping Beauty, as a 2-disc DVD & Blu-ray Disc, was released on October 7, 2008 in the US, making Sleeping Beauty the first entry in the Platinum Edition line to be released in high definition video. This release is based upon a new 2007 restoration of Sleeping Beauty from the original Technicolor negatives (intrapositives several generations removed from the original negative were used for other home video releases). The new restoration features the film in its full negative aspect ratio of 2.55:1, wider than both the prints shown at the film's original limited Technirama engagements in 2.20:1 and the CinemaScope-compatible reduction prints for general release at 2.35:1. The Blu-ray set features BD-Live, an online feature, and the extras include a virtual castle and multi-player games.^[14][15] The Blu-ray release also includes disc 1 of the DVD version of the film in addition to the two Blu-ray discs. The DVD was released on October 27, 2008 in the UK. The Blu-ray release is the first ever release on the Blu-ray format of any Disney feature produced by Walt Disney himself.

Other appearances [link]

Aurora is one of the seven Princesses of Heart in the popular Square Enix game Kingdom Hearts (although her appearances are brief), and Maleficent is a villain in all three Kingdom Hearts games, and as a brief ally at the third game's climax. The good fairies appear in Kingdom Hearts II, giving Sora new clothes. Diablo appears in Kingdom Hearts II to resurrect her defeated mistress. The PSP game Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, features a world based on the movie, Enchanted Dominion, and characters who appear are Aurora/Briar Rose, Maleficent, Maleficent's goons, the three faires and Prince Phillip, the latter serving as temporary party member for Aqua during her battle against Maleficent and her henchmen.

She is also a playable character in the game Disney Princess.

Princess Aurora, Prince Phillip, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather were featured as guests in Disney's House of Mouse and Maleficent was one of the villains in Mickey's House of Villains.

Maleficent's goons appear in the Maroon Cartoon studio lot in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The Bluebirds from the film also appear as "tweeting birds" that fly around Roger Rabbit's or Eddie Valiant's heads in two scenes, after a refrigerator fell on top of Roger's head and while Eddie Valiant is in Toontown, the birds are seen again flying around his head until he shoos them away.

The first all-new story featuring the characters from the movie appeared in Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams, the first volume of collection of the Disney Princesses. It was released on September 4, 2007.

Various characters from the film also appear in the board game of the same name.

Aurora is featured in a PSA for wildfire prevention with Smokey Bear.

Flora, Fauna and Merryweather have a brief computer animated cameo appearances in Shrek as well as Aurora, who also appeared in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third but looks different than her appearance in the Disney film.

In the American fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time, Maleficent appeared in the second episode, as she is an adversary of the Evil Queen, and is also sinister. Her role was played by Kristin Bauer.

Awards and nominations[link]

Academy Awards^[16]

• Best Scoring of a Musical Picture (George Bruns) (Lost against Porgy and Bess)

Grammy Awards^[17]

• Best Soundtrack Album, Original Cast - Motion Picture or Television (Lost against Porgy and Bess)

Young Artist Award^[18]

• Best Musical Entertainment Featuring Youth - TV or Motion Picture

American Film Institute Lists

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Maleficent - Nominated Villain^[19]
• AFI's 10 Top 10 - Nominated Animated Film^[20]

Media and merchandise[link]

Board game[link]

Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Game (1958) is a Parker Brothers children's board game for two to four players based upon Sleeping Beauty. The object of the game is to be the first player holding three different picture cards to reach the castle and the space marked "The End".^[21]

The Disney film retains the basics of Charles Perrault's 17th century fairy tale about a princess cursed to sleep one hundred years, but adds three elderly fairies who protect the princess, a prince armed with a magic sword and shield, and other details. The Disney twists on the tale are incorporated into the game, and Disney's "stunning graphics"^[21] illustrate the game board. In addition to the board game, the film generated books, toys, and other juvenile merchandise.

The equipment consists of a center-seamed game board, four tokens in various colors, four spinners, four magic wands, and a deck of picture cards.

The first player moves the number of spaces along the track according to their spin on their dial. If they land on a pink star, their turn ends. If they land on a yellow star, they draws a card and follows its instruction. If they draw a picture card, they retain it face down at their place. If a player spins a 6, they have the choice of moving 6 spaces or taking a magic wand. They may play the wand at any time during the game and in doing so draws 2 cards, following their instructions. A player must hold three different picture cards before entering the Path of Happiness. If they do not hold 3 picture cards, they continues around the Deep Sleep circle until they attains the required 3 picture cards. Should a player land on a purple Maleficent space, they returns one of their picture cards to the deck.

Theme parks[link]

Sleeping Beauty was made while Walt Disney was building Disneyland (hence the four year production time). To help promote the film, Imagineers named the park's icon "Sleeping Beauty Castle" (it was originally to be Snow White's).^{[citation needed]} An indoor walk-through exhibit was added to the empty castle interior in 1957, where guests could walk-through the castle, up and over the castle entrance, viewing "Story Moment" dioramas of scenes from the film, which were improved with animated figurines in 1977. It closed shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, supposedly because the dark, unmonitored corridors were a risk.^{[citation needed]} After being closed for seven years, the exhibit space underwent extensive refurbishment to restore the original 1957 displays, and reopened to guests on November 27, 2008. Accommodations were also made on the ground floor with a "virtual" version for disabled guests unable to navigate stairs. Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005, also with a Sleeping Beauty Castle, nearly replicating Disneyland's original design.

Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant at Disneyland Paris is a variant of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The version found at Disneyland Paris is much more reminiscent of the film's artistic direction. The Château features an animatronic dragon, imagineered to look like Maleficent's dragon form, is found in the lower level dungeon - La Tanière du Dragon.^[22] The building also contains la Galerie de la Belle au Bois Dormant, a gallery of displays which illustrate the story of Sleeping Beauty in tapestries, stained glass windows and figures.^[23]

Princess Aurora (and, to a lesser extent, Prince Phillip, the three good fairies, and Maleficent) makes regular appearances in the parks and parades.

Maleficent is featured as one of the villains in the nighttime show Fantasmic! at Disneyland and Disney's Hollywood Studios.

Stage adaptation[link]

A scaled-down stage musical version of the film with the title Disney's Sleeping Beauty KIDS is often performed by schools and children's theaters.^[24]

Soundtrack listing[link]

1. "Main Title"/"Once Upon a Dream"/"Prologue"
2. "Hail to the Princess Aurora"
3. "The Gifts of Beauty and Song"/"Maleficent Appears"/"True Love Conquers All"
4. "The Burning of the Spinning Wheels"/"The Fairies' Plan"
5. "Maleficent's Frustration"
6. "A Cottage in the Woods"
7. "Do You Hear That?"/"I Wonder"
8. "An Unusual Prince"/"Once Upon a Dream (reprise)"
9. "Magical House Cleaning"/"Blue or Pink"
10. "A Secret Revealed"
11. "Skumps (Drinking Song)"/"The Royal Argument"
12. "Prince Phillip Arrives"/"How to Tell Stefan"
13. "Aurora's Return"/"Maleficent's Evil Spell"
14. "Poor Aurora"/"Sleeping Beauty"
15. "Forbidden Mountain"
16. "A Fairy Tale Come True"
17. "Battle with the Forces of Evil"
18. "Awakening"
19. "Finale (Once Upon a Dream (third-prise))"

The Classic Disney: 60 Years of Musical Magic album includes "Once Upon a Dream" on the green disc, and "I Wonder" on the purple disc. Additionally, Disney's Greatest Hits includes "Once Upon a Dream" on the blue disc.

No Secrets performed a cover version of "Once Upon A Dream" on the album Disneymania 2, which appears as a music video on the 2003 DVD. More recently, Emily Osment sang a remake of "Once Upon A Dream", released on the Disney Channel on September 12, 2008, and included on the Platinum Edition DVD and Blu-ray.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Sleeping Beauty at AllRovi
• Sleeping Beauty at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Sleeping Beauty at the Internet Movie Database
• Sleeping Beauty at Rotten Tomatoes

v t e Disney theatrical animated features Walt Disney Animation Studios films (literary sources) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Pinocchio (1940) Fantasia (1940) Dumbo (1941) Bambi (1942) Saludos Amigos (1942) The Three Caballeros (1944) Make Mine Music (1946) Fun and Fancy Free (1947) Melody Time (1948) The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) Cinderella (1950) Alice in Wonderland (1951) Peter Pan (1953) Lady and the Tramp (1955) Sleeping Beauty (1959) One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) The Sword in the Stone (1963) The Jungle Book (1967) The Aristocats (1970) Robin Hood (1973) The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) The Rescuers (1977) The Fox and the Hound (1981) The Black Cauldron (1985) The Great Mouse Detective (1986) Oliver & Company (1988) The Little Mermaid (1989) The Rescuers Down Under (1990) Beauty and the Beast (1991) Aladdin (1992) The Lion King (1994) Pocahontas (1995) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Hercules (1997) Mulan (1998) Tarzan (1999) Fantasia 2000 (1999) Dinosaur (2000) The Emperor's New Groove (2000) Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) Lilo & Stitch (2002) Treasure Planet (2002) Brother Bear (2003) Home on the Range (2004) Chicken Little (2005) Meet the Robinsons (2007) Bolt (2008) The Princess and the Frog (2009) Tangled (2010) Winnie the Pooh (2011) Wreck-It Ralph (2012) Frozen (2013) Walt Disney Pictures films with animation The Reluctant Dragon (1941) Victory Through Air Power (1943) Song of the South (1946) So Dear to My Heart (1949) Mary Poppins (1964) Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) Pete's Dragon (1977) Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) Enchanted (2007) DisneyToon Studios films DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) A Goofy Movie (1995) Doug's 1st Movie (1999) The Tigger Movie (2000) Recess: School's Out (2001) Return to Never Land (2002) The Jungle Book 2 (2003) Piglet's Big Movie (2003) Teacher's Pet (2004) Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005) Bambi II (2006) Book Category

Walt Disney
Walt Disney on January 1, 1954
Born	Walter Elias Disney (1901-12-05)December 5, 1901[1] Hermosa, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	December 15, 1966(1966-12-15) (aged 65) Burbank, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Lung Cancer
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California, U.S.
Residence	Burbank, California
Nationality	American
Education	McKinley High School
Occupation	Film producer, Co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, formerly known as Walt Disney Productions
Years active	1920–1966
Home town	Chicago, Illinois
Political party	Republican
Board member of	The Walt Disney Company
Religion	Christian (Congregationalist)[2]
Spouse	Lillian Bounds (1925–1966; his death)
Children	Diane Marie Disney Sharon Mae Disney
Parents	Elias Disney Flora Call Disney
Relatives	Ronald William Miller (son-in-law) Robert Borgfeldt Brown (son-in-law) Roy Edward Disney (nephew)
Family	Herbert Arthur Disney (brother) Raymond Arnold Disney (brother) Roy Oliver Disney (brother) Ruth Flora Disney (sister)
Awards	7 Emmy Awards, 22 Academy Awards, Cecil B.DeMille Award
Signature

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon,^[3] 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 had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.^[4]

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 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year,^[5] giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history.^[6] 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 Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.

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[link]

Childhood[link]

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 Flora Call Disney, who was of German and English descent.^[7][8] 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.^[9] 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,^[10] hometown of his brother Robert^[10] who helped Elias financially for most of his early life.^[10] In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri,^[11] where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland.^[11] In Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing^[12] with one of the family's neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, paying him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse, Rupert.^[12] 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^[8] then try and spot his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, conducting the train.

10-year old Walt Disney (center right) at a gathering of Kansas City newsboys in 1912.

The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years,^[13] before moving to Kansas City in 1911^[14] 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.^[15] As well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute,^[16] 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.^{[citation needed]}

Teenage years[link]

In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city,^[17] where in the fall Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Art Institute.^[18] 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.^[19]

After his rejection by the army, Walt and a friend decided to join the Red Cross.^[20] 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.^[21]

Disney as an ambulance driver immediately after World War I

Hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory,^[22] in 1919 Walt moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career.^[23] 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^[23] where he created advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters.^[24] At Pesmen-Rubin he met cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks^[25] and when their time at the studio expired, they decided to start their own commercial company together.^[26]

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.^[27] 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.^[28] 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,^[29] and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Fred Harman, as his first employee.^[29] 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,^[30] to screen their cartoons at his local theater, which they titled Laugh-O-Grams.^[30]

Laugh-O-Gram Studio[link]

Presented as "Newman Laugh-O-Grams",^[30] Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area^[31] and through their success, he was able to acquire his own studio, also called Laugh-O-Gram,^[32] 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.^[33] Unfortunately, studio profits were insufficient to cover the high salaries paid to employees. Unable to successfully manage money,^[34] Disney's studio became loaded with debt^[34] and wound up bankrupt^[35] whereupon he decided to set up a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California.^[36]

Hollywood[link]

Disney and his brother Roy pooled their money and set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood^[37] where they needed to find a distributor for Walt's new Alice Comedies, which he had started making while in Kansas City^[35] 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.^[38]

Alice Comedies[link]

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[link]

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.^[39]

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.^[40]

Mickey Mouse[link]

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.^[41] 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."^[41] 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 called Steamboat Willie. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. Steamboat Willie became an instant success,^[42] 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.^[43] Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character^[41] and by 1930, despite their having sound, cartoons featuring Felix had faded from the screen after failing to gain attention.^[44] Mickey's popularity would subsequently skyrocket in the early 1930s.^[41]

[edit] 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 thought it was not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers,^[45] 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.^[46]

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.^[47] 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.^[48] Fleischer, considered Disney's main rival in the 1930s,^[49] 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.^[50] In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera,^[51] approached Walt and convinced him to reshoot the black and white Flowers and Trees in three-strip Technicolor.^[52] 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,^[53][54] a period eventually extended to five years.^[46] Through Silly Symphonies, Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time, The Three Little Pigs (1933).^[55] 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".^[56]

One of two stars dedicated to Walt Disney on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

First Academy Award[link]

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,^[57] with Goofy following in 1939.^[58] 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.^[59]

Children[link]

The Disneys' first attempt at pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Lillian became pregnant again and gave birth to a daughter, Diane Marie Disney, on December 18, 1933.^[60] Later, the Disneys adopted Sharon Mae Disney (December 31, 1936 – February 16, 1993).^[61]

Diane married Ron Miller at the age of 20 and is known as Diane Disney Miller. The Millers established and own a winery called Silverado Vineyards in California.^[62] Diane and Ron Miller have seven children: Christopher, Joanna, Tamara, Jennifer, Walter, Ronald and Patrick.^[63] Years later, Diane went on to become the cofounder of The Walt Disney Family Museum, with the aid of her children.^[60] The museum was created to preserve her father's image and reach out to millions of Disney fans worldwide.^[64] The museum displays a chronological view of Walt Disney's life through personal artifacts, interactive kiosks and various animations.^[64]

Sharon Mae Disney was born December 31, 1936, in Los Angeles, California and was later adopted by the Disneys, due to Lillian's several birth complications.^[63][65] In 1950, Sharon went on to star as herself in the Walt Disney Studios special One Hour in Wonderland.^[66] Sharon married Robert Brown in 1958, with whom she had one child, and they remained married until his death in 1967.^[65] Sharon married William Lund in 1969 and had two children with him, but six years later they divorced.^[65][67] Sharon was a philanthropist and had contributed to charities such as the Marianne Frostig Center of Educational Therapy and the Curtis School foundation.^[68] In 1993 at the age of 57, Sharon died from cancer at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California.^[65] After Sharon's death, her estate donated $11 million to the California School of Performing Arts, where she was a member of the board of trustees for almost two decades. Sharon's donation was commemorated by renaming the School of Dance the Sharon D. Lund School of Dance.^[60][69]

1937–1941: Golden age of animation[link]

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

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.^[70] 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.^[41] 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.^[71]

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. 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.^[72] The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over $8 million on its initial release. These initial release earnings for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would be the equivalent of $122,487,945 in 2010.^[73]

Golden age of animation[link]

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.^[74][75] 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.^{[clarification needed More info needed on end of the Silly Symphonies to make a new and separate sentence.]} Animator Fred Moore had redesigned Mickey Mouse in the late 1930s after Donald Duck overtook him in popularity among theater audiences.^[76]

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[link]

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.^[77]

Shortly after the release of Dumbo in October 1941, the US entered World War II. The U.S. Army and Navy Bureau of Aeronautics^[78] 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.^{[79][80][81][82][83]}

1945–1955: Post-war period[link]

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.^[84]

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.^[85] However, while Bugs Bunny's popularity rose in the 1940s, so did Donald Duck's,^[86] a character who would replace Mickey Mouse as Disney's star character by 1949.^[87]

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.

Walt Disney meets Wernher von Braun in 1954.

Disney and the Second Red Scare[link]

Disney was a founding member of the anti-communist group Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.  In 1947, during the Second Red Scare,^[88] 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.^[89][90]

Disney also accused the Screen Cartoonists Guild of being a Communist front, and charged that the 1941 strike was part of an organized Communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood.^[88]

1955–1966: Theme parks and beyond[link]

Planning Disneyland[link]

Disneyland: aerial view, August 1963, looking SE. New Melodyland Theater at top. Santa Ana Freeway (US 101 at the time, now I-5) upper left corner.

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. It also said that Disney may have been inspired to create Disneyland in the park Republic of the Children located in Manuel B. Gonnet, La Plata, Argentina, and opened in 1951.^[91] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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."^[92] 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[link]

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[link]

The Lilly Belle on display at Disneyland Main Station in 1993. The caboose's woodwork was done entirely by Walt himself.

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 46-foot (14 m) long trestle bridge, loops, overpasses, gradients, an elevated berm, and a 90-foot (27 m) 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.^{[clarification needed]}

Expansion into new areas[link]

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.^[93] In 1955, the studio's first daily television show, Mickey Mouse Club debuted on ABC. It was a groundbreaking comedy/variety show aimed specifically for children. Disney took a strong personal interest in the show and even returned to the animation studio to voice Mickey Mouse in its animated segments during its original 1955-59 production run. The Mickey Mouse Club would continue in various incarnations in syndication and on the Disney Channel 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.^[94] 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,^[95] 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.^[96] 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[link]

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[link]

In early 1964, Disney announced plans to develop another theme park to be called Disney World a few miles southwest 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[link]

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[link]

Like many people of the time, Walt Disney was a chain smoker his entire adult life, although he made sure he was not seen smoking around children.^[97] In 1966, Disney was scheduled to undergo surgery to repair an old neck injury^[98] caused by many years of playing polo at the Riviera Club in Hollywood.^[99] 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.^[100] Five days later a biopsy showed the tumor to be malignant and to have spread throughout the entire left lung.^[100] After removal of the lung, doctors informed Disney that his life expectancy was six months to two years.^[100] After several chemotherapy sessions, Disney and his wife spent a short amount of time in Palm Springs, California.^[98] 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.^[98] 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.^[101]

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 feature The Jungle Book and the animated short Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, as well as the live-action musical feature The Happiest Millionaire, all released in 1967. Songwriter Robert B. Sherman recalled of the last time he saw Disney:

Hibernation Urban Legend[link]

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.^[103] In fact, Disney was cremated on December 17, 1966, and his ashes interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The first known human cryogenic freezing did not occur until January 1967, more than a month after Disney's death.^[103]

According to "at least one Disney publicist", as reported in the French magazine Ici Paris in 1969, the source of the rumor was a group of Disney Studio animators with "a bizarre sense of humor" who were playing a final prank on their late boss.^[104]

Although the rumor is acknowledged as false by most historians, Robert Mosley (in Disney’s World (1986)) and Marc Eliot (in Walt Disney – Hollywood’s Dark Prince (1993)) argue that Disney may have known of cryonics and may have had an interest in the science.^[105] However his daughter Diane wrote in 1972, "There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics."^[104]

Legacy: 1967–present[link]

Continuing Disney Productions[link]

Plaque at the entrance that embodies the intended spirit of Disneyland by Walt Disney: to leave reality and enter fantasy

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.^[106] Roy died from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 20, 1971, the day he was due to open the Disneyland Christmas parade.

1968 US postage stamp

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[link]

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.^[107]

Disney Animation[link]

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 1980s in a period known as the Disney Renaissance. The most financially 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".^[108] With the rise of computer animated films a stream of financially unsuccessful Traditional hand-drawn animated features in the early years of the 2000s (decade) 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[link]

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.^[109] He also donated 38 acres (0.154 km²) 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: "A hundred years ago, Wagner conceived of a perfect and all-embracing art, combining music, drama, painting, and the dance, but in his wildest imagination he had no hint what infinite possibilities were to become commonplace through the invention of recording, radio, cinema and television. There already have been geniuses combining the arts in the mass-communications media, and they have already given us powerful new art forms. The future holds bright promise for those who imaginations are trained to play on the vast orchestra of the art-in-combination. Such supermen will appear most certainly in those environments which provide contact with all the arts, but even those who devote themselves to a single phase of art will benefit from broadened horizons."^[110]

Walt Disney Family Museum[link]

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.^[111]

Antisemitism accusations[link]

Disney was long rumored to be antisemitic during his lifetime, and such rumors have persisted after his death. Indeed, in the 1930s he welcomed German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood.^[112] 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.^[114]

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 and The Opry House. However, the museum points out that Disney employed Jews throughout his career, donated to several Jewish charities (The Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Yeshiva College^{[disambiguation needed ]}, Jewish Home for the Aged, The American League for a Free Palestine)^[114] and was named "1955 Man of the Year" by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills.^[114][115]

Academy Awards[link]

This display case in the lobby of the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco shows many of the Academy Awards he won, including the distinctive special award at the bottom for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

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. His last competitive Academy Award was posthumous.^[116]

• 1932: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Flowers and Trees (1932)
• 1932: Honorary Award for creation of Mickey Mouse.
• 1934: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Three Little Pigs (1933)
• 1935: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: The Tortoise and the Hare (1934)
• 1936: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Three Orphan Kittens (1935)
• 1937: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: The Country Cousin (1936)
• 1938: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: The Old Mill (1937)
• 1939: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: 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, unique in the history of the Oscars, is one large statuette and seven miniature statuettes.)^[5]
• 1940: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: 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."^[5]
• 1942: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Lend a Paw (1941)
• 1943: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)
• 1949: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Seal Island (1948)
• 1949: Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (Honorary Award)
• 1951: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Beaver Valley (1950)
• 1952: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Nature's Half Acre (1951)
• 1953: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Water Birds (1952)
• 1954: Best Documentary, Features: The Living Desert (1953)
• 1954: Best Documentary, Short Subjects: The Alaskan Eskimo (1953)
• 1954: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953)
• 1954: Best Short Subject, Two-reel: Bear Country (1953)
• 1955: Best Documentary, Features: The Vanishing Prairie (1954)
• 1956: Best Documentary, Short Subjects: Men Against the Arctic
• 1959: Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects: Grand Canyon
• 1969: Best Short Subject, Cartoons: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

Other honors[link]

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.^[117] In 1935, Walt received a special medal from the League of Nations for creation of Mickey Mouse, held to be Mickey Mouse award.^[118] He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964.^[119] 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 Karachkina, is named after him.^[120]

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

Waltograph, a freeware typeface, is based on his signature and handwriting.

In 1993, HBO began development of a Walt Disney biopic, directed by Frank Pierson and produced by Lawrence Turman, but the project never materialized and was soon abandoned.^[121] However, Walt - The Man Behind the Myth, a biographical documentary about Disney, was later made.^[122]

See also[link]

	Disney portal
	Animation portal

• Disney family
• Walt Disney anthology television series

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Thomas, Bob (1994). Walt Disney: An American Original. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 0-7868-6027-8. 

Further reading[link]

• 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
• Thomas, Bob (1991). Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1-56282-899-1. 
• Watts, Steven, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, University of Missouri Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8262-1379-0

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walt Disney

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walt Disney

• Walt Disney at the Internet Movie Database
• Walt Disney at the TCM Movie Database
• Works by or about Walt Disney in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Walt Disney Family Museum
• Walt Disney Gravesite

Mary Costa (born April 5, 1930 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American singer, actress, and Disney Legend. She is best known for playing the voice of Princess Aurora in the 1959 Disney film Sleeping Beauty. She is also a professional opera singer.

Biography[link]

Costa was born in 1930 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lived for much of her childhood. She sang Sunday School solos at the age of six. When she was in her early teens, Costa's family relocated to Los Angeles, California, where she completed high school and won a Music Sorority Award as the outstanding voice among Southern California High School seniors. Following high school, she entered the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to study with famed maestro Gaston Usigli. Between 1948 and 1951, she appeared with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the Bergen radio show. She also sang with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in concerts at UCLA, and made numerous commercials for Lux Radio Theatre.

In 1952, after meeting people at a party with her future husband, director Frank Tashlin, she auditioned for the part of Disney's Princess Aurora. Walt Disney called her personally within hours of the audition to inform her that the part was hers. In 1958, Costa was called upon to substitute for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at a gala concert in the Hollywood Bowl, conducted by Carmen Dragon. Because of her glowing reviews from that performance, she was invited to sing the lead in her first fully staged operatic production, The Bartered Bride, produced by the renowned German producer, Carl Ebert, for the Los Angeles Guild Opera. Ebert later requested that Mary appear at the Glyndebourne Festival, where she made a debut.

Costa went on to perform in 44 operatic roles on stages throughout the world, including Jules Massenet's Manon at the Metropolitan Opera, and Violetta in La Traviata at the Royal Opera House in London and the Bolshoi in Moscow, and Cunegonde in the 1959 London premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. In 1961, for RCA, she recorded Musetta in La bohème, opposite Anna Moffo and Richard Tucker, with the Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Among numerous roles sung for San Francisco Opera, she was Tytania in the American premiere of Britten's A Midsummer Nights Dream (1961), Ninette in the world premiere of Norman Dello Joio's Blood Moon (1961) and Anne Truelove in the San Francisco premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Violetta in La Traviata on January 6, 1964 receiving one of the season’s greatest ovations and enthusiastic praise from critics.

Ms. Costa impressed television audiences throughout her career with guest appearances on many shows, such as Bing Crosby’s Christmas Show on NBC-TV. She appeared with Bing Crosby and Sergio Franchi on The Hollywood Palace in 1970. She also appeared on Frank Sinatra’s “Woman of the Year” Timex Special for NBC, where she was honored, along with Juliet Prowse, Lena Horne, and Eleanor Roosevelt, as women of the year. In 1972, Sammy Davis Jr. asked Mary to appear on his first NBC Follies. Among his other guests that evening, were Mickey Rooney and Ernest Borgnine. Mary performed a blues selection with Sammy, backed up by one of her favorite performers, Charlie Parker. Her other television credits include appearances on the Academy Awards, and the shows of Jim Nabors, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Della Reese, Joey Bishop, George Burns, Don Knotts, Dinah Shore, and many others.

Jacqueline Kennedy asked her to sing at a memorial service for her husband, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, from the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1963. She sang for the inaugural concert of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971. In 1972, she starred in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature The Great Waltz, depicting the life of Austrian composer Johann Strauss II. Additional movie credits include The Big Caper (1957) and Marry Me Again (1953).

Costa has dedicated her later years to inspiring children and teenagers, giving motivational talks at schools and colleges across the country. She is also a celebrity ambassador for Childhelp, a child abuse prevention and treatment non-profit organization. She continues to do promotional appearances for Disney, most recently for the Blu-ray release of "Sleeping Beauty" and the 50th anniversary of the film.

In 1989 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Licia Albanese Puccini Foundation. In November 1999 she received the Disney Legends Award, and her handprints are now a permanent part of the Disney Legends Plaza at the entrance to Disney Studios. In 2000 she was selected as the Tennessee Woman of Distinction by the American Lung Association. And in April 2001, she was honored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild for Distinguished Verdi Performances of the 20th Century. In 2003 she was appointed by President Bush to the National Council on the Arts, where she served until 2007. In December 2007, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee. On November 2, 2007, she was inducted into the Knoxville Opera Hall of Fame. Earlier she had launched the inaugural Knoxville Opera season in 1978 as Violetta in La Traviata.

Filmography[link]

• Titus Andronicus (2000) - Mourner
• The Great Waltz (1972) - Jetty Treffz
• Sleeping Beauty (1959) - Princess Aurora (voice/singing voice)
• The Big Caper (1957) - Kay
• Marry Me Again (1953) - Joan

Sources[link]

• Cummings, David (ed.), "Costa, Mary, International Who's Who in Classical Music, Routledge, 2003, p. 158. ISBN 1-85743-174-X
• Hayes, John "2 with Futures to Follow: Mary Costa and Marilyn Horne", Billboard 16 May 1964 p. 38
• Hollis, Tim and Ehrbar, Greg, Mouse tracks: the story of Walt Disney Records, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 52. ISBN 1-57806-849-5
• Kennedy, Michael and Bourne, Joyce, "Costa, Mary", The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford University Press, 1996. (accessed via Encyclopedia.com. 26 January 2010)
• Metropolitan Opera, Performance Record: Costa, Mary (Soprano), on the MetOpera Database
• Sleeman, Elizabeth (ed.), "Costa, Mary" The International Who's Who of Women, Routledge, 2001, p. 116. ISBN 1-85743-122-7
• The Walt Disney Company, Disney Legends: Mary Costa (accessed 26 January 2010)

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Mary Costa at the Internet Movie Database
• Mary Costa at the Disney Legends Website