Biography of Walt Disney

Quick Facts

Name

Walt Disney

Birth Date 

December 5, 1901

Death Date 

December 15, 1966

Education 

Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, McKinley High School, Chicago Art Institute

Place of Birth 

Chicago, Illinois

Place of Death 

Burbank, California

AKA

Walt Disney

 

Full Name

Walter Elias Disney

Walt Disney was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of cartoon films and as the creator of Disneyland.

Synopsis

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Hermosa, Illinois. He and his brother Roy co-founded Walt Disney Productions, which became one of the best-known motion-picture production companies in the world. Disney was an innovative animator and created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse. He won 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime, and was the founder of theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Early Life

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. His father was Elias Disney, an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was German-American. Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl. He lived most of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, where he began drawing, painting and selling pictures to neighbors and family friends. In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where Disney developed a love for trains. His uncle, Mike Martin, was a train engineer who worked the route between Fort Madison, Iowa, and Marceline. Later, Disney would work a summer job with the railroad, selling snacks and newspapers to travelers.

Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing cartoonist for the school paper. At night, he took courses at the Chicago Art Institute. When Disney was 16, he dropped out of school to join the army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance.

Early Cartoons

When Disney returned from France in 1919, he moved back to Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist. His brother Roy got him a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met cartoonist Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, better known as Ub Iwerks. From there, Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animation. Around this time, Disney began experimenting with a camera, doing hand-drawn cel animation, and decided to open his own animation business. From the ad company, he recruited Fred Harman as his first employee.

Walt and Harman made a deal with a local Kansas City theater to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams. The cartoons were hugely popular, and Disney was able to acquire his own studio, upon which he bestowed the same name. Laugh-O-Gram hired a number of employees, including Harman's brother Hugh and Ub Iwerks. They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland. By 1923, however, the studio had become burdened with debt, and Disney was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Disney and his brother, Roy, soon pooled their money and moved to Hollywood. Iwerks also relocated to California, and there the three began the Disney Brothers' Studio. Their first deal was with New York distributor Margaret Winkler, to distribute their Alice cartoons. They also invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and contracted the shorts at $1,500 each.
In 1925, Disney hired an ink-and-paint artist named Lillian Bounds. After a brief courtship, the couple married.

A few years later, Disney discovered that Winkler and her husband, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to Oswald, along with all of Disney’s animators, except for Iwerks. Right away the Disney brothers, their wives and Iwerks produced three cartoons featuring a new character Walt had been developing called Mickey Mouse. The first animated shorts featuring Mickey were Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, both silent films for which they failed to find distribution. When sound made its way into film, Disney created a third, sound-and-music-equipped short called Steamboat Willie. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon was an instant sensation.

Commercial Success

In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which featured Mickey's newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme for the country in the midst of the Great Depression.
On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, premiered in Los Angeles. It produced an unimaginable $1.499 million, in spite of the Depression, and won a total of eight Oscars. During the next five years, Walt Disney Studios completed another string of full-length animated films, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

In December 1939, a new campus for Walt Disney Studios was opened in Burbank. A setback for the company occurred in 1941, however, when there was a strike by Disney animators. Many of them resigned, and it would be years before the company fully recovered. During the mid-40s, Disney created "packaged features," groups of shorts strung together to run at feature length, but by 1950, he was once again focusing on animated features. Cinderella was released in 1950, followed by Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), a live-action film called Treasure Island (1950), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). In all, more than 100 features were produced by his studio.

Disney was also among the first to use television as an entertainment medium. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were extremely popular with children, as was The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenagers known as the Mouseketeers. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was a popular Sunday night show, which Disney used to begin promoting his new theme park. Disney's last major success that he produced himself was the motion picture Mary Poppins, which mixed live action and animation.

Disneyland

Disney's $17 million Disneyland theme park opened in 1955. It was a place where children and their families could explore, take rides and meet the Disney characters. In a very short time, the park had increased its investment tenfold, and was entertaining tourists from around the world.

Death

Within a few years of the opening, Disney began plans for a new theme park and Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow in Florida. It was still under construction when, in 1966, Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65. Disney was cremated, and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. After his brother's death, Roy carried on the plans to finish the Florida theme park, which opened in 1971 under the name Walt Disney World.

Biography of Nicolas Cage

Quick Facts

Name

Nicolas Cage

Occupation 

Film Actor

Birth Date 

January 7, 1964

Education 

Beverly Hills High School, American Conservatory Theatre

Place of Birth 

Long Beach, California

AKA

Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Coppola

 

Originally

Nicolas Kim Coppola

Actor Nicolas Cage, star of such films as Moonstruck and The Rock, is known for his intense on- and off-screen personality, as well as his passion for method acting.

Synopsis

Born in California on January 7, 1964, Nicolas Cage fell in love with acting during a summer class at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. He got his start in teenage comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and went on to play a wide variety of roles in such films as Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, and Con Air. He received an Academy Award for his role in 1995's Leaving Las Vegas.

Early Life

Nicolas Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964, in Long Beach, California, to choreographer Joy Vogelsang and literature professor August Coppola. Cage has two older brothers, Marc and Christopher. He is the nephew of film director Francis Ford Coppola and, as a youth, visited his uncle often at his San Francisco home.

At age 15, Cage fell in love with acting during a summer class at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. He dropped out of Beverly Hills High School to pursue an acting career, making his debut on television in 1981. He changed his name to Nicolas Cage as a way to separate his identity from that of his famous uncle. He chose the name Cage as a tribute to comic-book superhero Luke Cage.

Cage is known for his edgy, intense personality both on and off the screen, as well as for his passion for method acting. He is said to have had two teeth pulled for his role in Birdy (1984), slashed his arm for Racing With the Moon (1984) and swallowed a live cockroach for Vampire's Kiss (1992). He is also alleged to have destroyed a street vendor's remote-controlled car in a fit of rage while preparing for his role as a mobster in The Cotton Club (1984).

Film Debut

Cage got his start in teenage comedies, with his debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, also featuring Sean Penn), followed by a leading role as a punk rocker in Valley Girl (1983). Francis Ford Coppola gave him a small role in his critically acclaimed Rumble Fish (1983). His first serious dramatic role was opposite Matthew Modine in Birdy (1984). This was followed by Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), the Coen Brothers' comedy Raising Arizona (1987), Moonstruck (1987, starring Cher), David Lynch's bizarre Wild at Heart (1990), Vampire's Kiss (1992) and the comedy Honeymoon in Vegas (1992).

By 1994, Cage was valued at about $4 million per picture, but agreed to star in Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995) for only $240,000 because of the strength of the role. It paid off- his portrayal of the alcoholic screenwriter earned him a Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Actor.

Later Roles

Since 1995, Cage has made a series of action thrillers, including The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), John Woo's Face/Off (1997, opposite John Travolta), and Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes (1998). In 1998, he starred in the romantic City of Angels with Meg Ryan. After returning to the action genre with the poorly-rated 8MM and headlining Martin Scorsese's dark Bringing Out the Dead in 1999, Cage reportedly received a $20 million paycheck for the action extravaganza Gone in 60 Seconds, costarring Angelina Jolie.
Cage played a more traditional romantic lead in his next two movies, the Christmas 2000 release The Family Man and the World War II-era epic Captain Corelli's Mandolin, starring the much-in-demand actress and Spanish import Penelope Cruz. In December 2002, Cage launched his directorial debut, the $5 million independent film Sonny, about a male gigolo who struggles to free himself from his madam mother.

Cage also starred in Adaptation, playing both ill-tempered screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and twin brother Donald. Upcoming projects include costarring with Chow Yun-Fat in director John Woo's action Western Land of Destiny and starring and co-producing Dead to Rights, a movie version of the hugely popular video game. The busy actor also starred in director Jon Turteltaub's 2004 holiday blockbuster National Treasure, playing an archaeologist-historian who believes a treasure map is hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

Personal Life

Cage's relationship with Kristina Fulton, a model, lasted several years, producing a son, Weston Coppola Cage, born in 1992. Cage has been married three times: The first to actress Patricia Arquette in 1995; the second was a short-lived marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley, the only daughter of the late King of Rock and Roll, in August 2002- and most recently, he wed his girlfriend, 20-year-old former waitress Alice Kim, at a private ranch in Northern California in August 2004. The couple announced the birth of a son, Kal-el Coppola Cage, on October 3, 2005.