At ten years old, Bobby Driscoll was Walt Disney’s pet actor. At 31, I was dead after going through a hell of drugs, bad grades, armed robbery and a period in prison. The story of the first child actor hired by Disney it’s riddled with bad decisions, violence, TV shows, acne, and Andy Warhol.
the child prodigy
Bobby Driscoll’s first role came by chance: walking around the studio after a casting, he asked, seeing a fake boat, where the water was. The ‘Lost Angel’ director was so impressed with her vivacity that he offered her her first role.which meant the opening of the doors of an industry that, at that time, in the mid-40s, was more than open to child stars in a Hollywood less regulated than trying to find his new Shirley Temple to exploit.
Little to Little by little, the child actor began to chain roles: in 1944 he made three films and in 1946 he was already making seven. And among those, the first under a Walt Disney contract: the currently infamous ‘Song of the South’, which catapulted him to fame. Driscoll was one of the first two boys hired by the already mammoth producer. Luana Patten, the other lucky one, didn’t have much better luck in life after that.
oh! But those years were fabulous: the movies never stopped coming, linking up with each other, he had the opportunity to work for RKO and even participated in a box office hit like ‘Treasure Island’. In 1950, at the age of thirteen, Bobby won an honorary Oscar for best youth performance., a distinction that has only been distributed ten times in history. The future looked bright for Driscoll… If it wasn’t for that annoying acne.
From acne to the ground
Walt Disney had great ideas for his protégé, but everything was on wet paper. During her last years at Disney she appeared in Richard Fleischer movies and was the biggest attraction in films like ‘When I grow up’. In 1951, At fourteen, Driscoll made his last big role: the voice and face (animated) of ‘Peter Pan’, since the animators took him as a model.
By then, Driscoll was paid $1,750 a week. (about 20,000 today) simply for being available, something that, in the long run, turned into doing nothing. Walt Disney, convinced that his time as a lovable boy was over, condemned him to play the class bullies… But no one had a role like that prepared for him. In 1953, the acne on his face was so evident that he could no longer pass as a child star.: the same year of the premiere of ‘Peter Pan’, the actor was seen on the street to the indifference of Hollywood.
And the thing I feared the most began: At fourteen, Bobby Driscoll had to face real life. His parents took him out of the school for child actors and put him in a public one, where, as you can imagine, he was never accepted. This marginalization led him to continuous fights, loneliness and, ultimately, drugs. So, in general, but more specifically the heroin, who was the one who had money to get. And his career began to go down the drain.
Weddings, prisons and drugs in New York
At 19, the one who five years earlier was picking up an Oscar He was arrested for possession of marijuana. That same year, he went to Mexico to marry his longtime girlfriend: in a couple of years they had two boys and a girl, and later divorced. Record time, of course. In this period appeared in a few more or less successful television series (‘Látigo’, ‘El millionario’) and loose roles in radio and theater.
in between, the debacle. He was arrested for attacking two men at gunpoint who insulted him while he was washing his girlfriend’s car, was sentenced as a drug addict, forced into a California rehab center the same year he got a star on the Walk of Fame. .. And, when leaving, in 1962, at the age of 25, no one remembered him anymore. The ephemeral Hollywood.
At 28, he packed his suitcase and headed to New York, convinced he could turn his career around and become a Broadway star. Instead, ended up getting into the artistic community of Andy Warholwhere he found a second home: his paintings were surprisingly good, he was gaining fame… And, after one last role in 1965, he disappeared.
The end of the Bobby Driscoll story is not pretty: in 1968, some children who were playing in abandoned apartments they found him dead, along with beer bottles and religious pamphlets. His name was not checked and he was buried in a cemetery for the poor after no one requested the body. A year later, when the mother wanted to find him to say goodbye to his dying fatherWalt Disney employees found the truth.
Years later, his story was recalled (in a dirty way) in ‘Chip and Chop’, in which the villain of the story, Sweet Pete, dressed as Peter Pan, he was an actor who was the company’s favorite until he reached puberty and was forced out of the Hollywood machine. As a joke about young actors it’s not bad, but knowing the history of Bobby Driscoll… Maybe they didn’t spin as fine as they should.