Walt Disney was an American business magnate, cartoonist, filmmaker, philanthropist and voice actor.  During a business trip in the late 1940's, Walt Disney sketched his ideas for a children's amusement park in California. Over the next five years, plans for Disneyland were developed and implemented.  Disneyland opened in Anaheim on July 17, 1955 with thousands of people in attendance, including Ronald Reagan, Bob Cummings, Art Linkletter and the city's mayor.  By the early 1960s, Walt Disney Productions empire was established as the world's leading producer of family entertainment.  In late 1965, he announced plans to develop another theme park to be called Disney World in Orlando, Florida, a larger and more elaborate version of Disneyland, to include the "Magic Kingdom." It would also feature a number of golf courses and resort hotels, with EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) in the center of the park.

Walt Disney's life was one of hardship, struggle, joy and success.  He was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, the fourth of three sons and one younger daughter of Elias and Flora Disney. His love for drawing started when he was just four years old when he copied newspaper cartoons. In July 1911, when Walt was ten,  his father purchased a newspaper delivery route in Kansas City, Missouri; he and his older brother Roy were put to work delivering about 700 newspapers, twice daily, before and after school for the next six years.  In 1917, the family moved back to Chicago where Walt attended high school and took night courses at an art school. He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic topics on World War I.  Walt dropped out of school at age 16 and joined the Red Cross in France as an ambulance driver during the war. In 1919, Roy got him a job in Kansas City creating ads for newspapers, magazines and movie theaters.   Soon afterward, he and a friend (Ubbe Iwerks) started their own short-lived commercial artist company. In 1921, Walt and Roy opened their own animation business creating cartoons called Laugh-O-Grams (modernized fairy tales) which they showed at a local Kansas City theater. The cartoons became widely popular and he acquired his own studio in 1922, hiring additional animators. Unfortunately, with insufficient profits, high salaries and Walt's inability to successfully manage money, the studio became loaded with debt and wound up bankrupt.  In October 1923, he and Roy decided to re-establish their studio in Hollywood and named it Disney Brothers' Studio.  They received their first earnings of $1,500 in December 1923 for the first of an  animated silent film series, Alice Comedies, based on Disney's earlier short animated film,  Alice's Wonderland.

In 1925 Walt hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid -- after a short courtship, they married in July of the same year (and remained together until Walt's death in 1966). The couple raised two daughters, Diane and Sharon, and had ten grandchildren.

In 1927, the studio created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and chose Universal Pictures for its series distribution. Oswald was almost an instant success. But when Walt attempted to negotiate a higher price for the series, Universal refused and claimed total contractual rights to the character.  It took the studio 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character from NBC Universal in 2006.

Walt subsequently created Mickey Mouse as a replacement for Oswald, based on a mouse he had once adopted as a pet.  Originally named "Mortimer," Lillian later renamed him "Mickey."  Mickey Mouse became Disney Studios' star attraction in cartoons, songs, merchandise and comic books (and The Micky Mouse Club and the Mouseketeers). Other animated creations followed (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Pinocchio, The Three Little Pigs, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Chip & Dale and more) and were included in the studio's animated film lineup.  The studio went on to produce full-length cartoon movies, and later live-action films.

Walt Disney was a chain smoker his entire adult life, although he made sure he was not seen smoking around children.  On Nov. 2, 1966, during pre-op X-rays to repair an old polo neck injury, doctors discovered cancer in his left lung. Despite surgery and treatment, Walt Disney passed away on Dec. 15,1966, (ten days after his 65th birthday) from acute circulatory collapse caused by lung cancer..

After his death, his brother, Roy Disney, returned from retirement to take full control of the company.  In October 1972, the families of Walt and Roy met in front of Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom to officially open the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando.  The EPCOT Center opened in 1982 during the second phase of the park.  As it currently exists, EPCOT is essentially a living world's fair, different from the functional city that Disney had envisioned.

During his lifetime, Walt Disney received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history.  Walt Disney also won seven Emmy Awards, and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the United States, as well as the international resorts, Tokyo Disney Resort (opened in 1983), Disneyland Paris (opened in 1992) and Hong Kong Disneyland (opened in 2005).

  

  

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