At a glance
- Age
- 65
- Born
- December 5, 1901
- From
- Chicago
- Lives in
- Kansas City
- Nationality
- United States
Biography
The name turns up constantly in motivational clips, usually attached to a line about dreaming or starting. What sits behind those quotes is a working career in film: an American animator and producer who also did voice work and ran his own business, and who pushed through a series of technical and production changes in how cartoons were made at a time when the American animation industry was still being invented.
The record he left is unusually concrete. As a producer he won 22 Academy Awards from 59 nominations — still the most by any individual on both counts. He also received two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy, among other honours. Several of his films were later selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and the American Film Institute has named some of them among the best made.
He was born Walter Elias Disney in Chicago in December 1901 and died in December 1966, ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday. The work that carries his name to a modern audience is mostly the films — but the reason his words get quoted is the career underneath them: someone who built an industry position from a form of filmmaking that had no established rules when he entered it.
The record he left is unusually concrete. As a producer he won 22 Academy Awards from 59 nominations — still the most by any individual on both counts. He also received two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy, among other honours. Several of his films were later selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and the American Film Institute has named some of them among the best made.
He was born Walter Elias Disney in Chicago in December 1901 and died in December 1966, ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday. The work that carries his name to a modern audience is mostly the films — but the reason his words get quoted is the career underneath them: someone who built an industry position from a form of filmmaking that had no established rules when he entered it.
