Oliver Stone

Born
William Oliver StoneSeptember 15, 1946 (1946-09-15) (age 62)New York City, New York
Other name(s)
Minh DucOliver W. Stone - Hannah's Favorite
Occupation
film director, producer and screenwriter
Years active
1971 - present
Spouse(s)
Najwa Sarkis (1971-1977)Elizabeth Stone (1981-1993)Sun-jung Jung (1996-)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay1978 Midnight ExpressBest Director1986 Platoon1989 Born on the Fourth of July
BAFTA Awards
Best Direction1987 Platoon
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Made for Television Movie1995 Indictment: The McMartin Trial
Golden Globe Awards
Best Screenplay1978 Midnight Express1989 Born on the Fourth of JulyBest Director - Motion Picture1986 Platoon1989 Born on the Fourth of July1991 JFK
Other awards
Silver Bear for Best Director'1986 Platoon Honorary Golden Bear1990 Lifetime AchievementBSFC Award for Best Director1986 Platoon CFCA Award for Best Director1995 Nixon Independent Spirit Award for Best Director1986 Platoon Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay1986 Platoon KCFCC Award for Best Director1986 Platoon ; SalvadorWalk of Fame - Motion Picture7013 Hollywood Blvd
1996 Humanist Arts AwardAmerican Humanist Association
William Oliver Stone (born 15 September 1946) is an American film director and screenwriter. Stone came to prominence as a director with a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he participated as an American infantry soldier, and his work continues to focus frequently on contemporary political and cultural issues, often controversially. His work has earned him three Academy Awards and status as a Hollywood icon.

Biography
Stone was born in New York City, the son of Jacqueline (née Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker.[1] He grew up affluent and lived in townhouses in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His father was Jewish and his mother a Roman Catholic of French birth, and Stone was raised an Episcopalian as a compromise[2] but has since converted to Buddhism.
Stone attended Trinity School before his parents sent him away to attend The Hill School, an exclusive college-preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His parents divorced while he was away at The Hill School, and only then did Stone learn of his father's extramarital affairs with the wives of several family friends. Stone's father took him to a prostitute to lose his virginity, in his midteens. Stone's father was also influential in obtaining jobs for his son including work on a financial exchange in France, where Stone often spent his summer vacation with his maternal grandparents, a job that proved inspirational to Stone for his movie Wall Street. Stone eventually graduated from The Hill School in 1964, the same year as former JP Morgan & Co. CEO, Douglas A. Warner III.
Stone was then admitted into Yale University, where he subsequently dropped out after one year.[3] Stone had become inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim as well as by Zorba the Greek and George Harrison's music to teach English at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam. Stone taught in Vietnam for six months after which he worked as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship, traveling to Oregon and Mexico, before returning to Yale, where he dropped out a second time. While at Yale, Stone and long-time friend Lloyd Kaufman, worked on an early Troma Entertainment production "The Battle of Love's Return" (1971). Both also acted in the movie, Stone in a cameo role.[4] Stone eventually graduated from film school at New York University (where he was mentored by director Martin Scorsese) in 1971, after his service in Vietnam.
A veteran of the Vietnam war, Stone served with the U.S. Army from April 1967 to November 1968. He specifically requested combat duty and was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division, and was wounded twice in action. His personal awards include the Bronze Star with "V" device for valor for "extraordinary acts of courage under fire", and the Purple Heart with one Oak Leaf Cluster.
He has made three films about Vietnam – Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven & Earth (1993). He has called these films a trilogy, though they each deal with different aspects of the war. Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone's experience in combat. Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic. Heaven & Earth is derived from the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, the true story of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese girl whose life is drastically affected by the war. During this same period, Stone directed Wall Street (1987), which earned Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor; Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio (1988), and The Doors (1991), starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
Stone has won three Academy Awards. His first Oscar was for Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978). He won Academy Awards for Directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.
For Year of the Dragon (1985) he received a Razzie nomination in the category Worst Screenplay. Other films whose screenplays he participated in are Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983), 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) and Evita (1996). In addition, he has written or taken part in the writing of every film he has directed, except for U Turn (1997). The very first film that he directed professionally was the obscure horror picture Seizure (1974).
A distinctive feature of Oliver Stone's films is the use of many different cameras and film formats, from VHS to 8 mm film to 70 mm film. He sometimes uses several formats in a single scene, as in JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994).
I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.–Oliver Stone

Recent work
In the past decade, Stone has directed U-Turn (1997), which he describes as a small film that he would enjoy seeing as a teenager, Any Given Sunday (1999), a film about power struggles within and surrounding an American football team, and Alexander (2004), a biographical film about Alexander the Great.
He later said he was stung by the critical pans of Alexander, which was a financial failure despite being one of the highest-grossing films internationally in 2004 – production and marketing costs were not recovered.[6] Stone has recently said that the film has recouped the cost (over 3.5 million DVDs sold in the U.S. alone). He re-edited the film as the Director's Cut, which was shortened from 175 minutes to 167 minutes. A third version of the film, a 3 hour and 45 minute extended cut, was released February 27, 2007 on the DVD, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD formats.
After Alexander, Stone went on to direct World Trade Center, which centered on two Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) cops during the September 11, 2001 attacks. The main undercurrent of the film is hope through times of trial. The film did not do as well as it was expected, grossing $70 million (as of November 17, 2006), though the film was made on a budget of $63 million. As of December 19, 2006, the worldwide box office for World Trade Center was $161,735,806.
On August 28, 2007, it was announced Stone would direct Pinkville, a Vietnam war drama set to star Bruce Willis and Channing Tatum. The film's plot was to focus on the investigation into the 1968 My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese civilians. It would have been Stone's fourth Vietnam film, after Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. The film was to have been made for the newly reformed United Artists.[7] However, United Artists halted its December 2007 production start because of the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike.
Stone's latest film is a biopic satire about George W. Bush, named W. Stone indicated that it would be a "fair, but true portrait of the man". Satirically portraying the controversial President's childhood, relationship with his father, struggles with alcoholism, subsequent conversion to Christianity, his political career and presidency up through the invasion of Iraq. The film is based on a screenplay by Stone and Stanley Weiser, who had co-written Wall Street (1987). Josh Brolin was cast in the role of Bush [8], James Cromwell as Bush Sr. [9] and Elizabeth Banks as his wife. Filming began on May 12, 2008 in Shreveport, Louisiana and wrapped in June. [10] W. was released on October 17 2008, in time for the U.S. presidential election in November.

Controversy
Stone's films often have been criticized for promoting conspiracy theories and historical inaccuracies. JFK, for instance, hypothesizes many high-level government officials having a hand in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1991, he showed the film to Congress on Capitol Hill, which helped lead to passage of the Assassination Materials Disclosure Act[11] of 1992. The Assassination Records Review Board (created by Congress to end the secrecy surrounding Kennedy's assassination) discussed the film, including Stone's observation at the end of the film, about the dangers inherent in government secrecy.[12]
The film JFK was widely criticized in the media as being a mixture of truth and fiction. Stone published an annotated version of the screenplay, in which he cites references for his claims, shortly after the film's release. Similarly, he published an annotated version of his screenplay for the film Nixon, nominated for four Academy Awards, which was also criticized for its portrayal of President Richard M. Nixon.
Stone's screenplay Midnight Express was criticised for portraying the Turkish people in an overly negative light. The original author, Billy Hayes, around whom the film is set, has spoken out against the film, protesting that he had many Turkish friends while in jail.
Stone's film The Doors received criticism from Ray Manzarek (keyboardist–bass player) during a question and answer session at Indiana University East (in Richmond, Indiana) in 1997. During the discussion Manzarek stated that he sat down with Stone about The Doors and Jim Morrison for over 12 hours. He said none of the content of the discussion - such as details on important events in the history of The Doors and Morrison's personal life - was present in the film. Manzarek went on to say that Stone's film was highly inaccurate about Morrison and The Doors.
Patricia Kennealy Morrison, the rock critic and author, Morrison's widow (and a high school friend of Billy Hayes), is on record publicly and privately with ferociously angry criticism of Stone's film. She was a consultant on the movie, in which she also has a cameo appearance, but she writes in her memoir Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (Dutton, 1992) that Stone ignored everything she told him and proceeded with his own version of events. From the moment the movie was released, she blasted it as untruthful and inaccurate.[13]
Natural Born Killers is filmed and edited in a frenzied style where animation, grainy black-and-white 8 mm film, color 35 mm film, and VHS are intercut and juxtaposed in a psychedelic montage of images showing not only the story's action, but also conveying the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The film was criticized by some for its apparent glorification of violence. Stone refutes this claim, saying that it is a satire of the American media's glorification of violence and violent people. The original screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino, was unhappy with the end result of the film because of the attention Stone gave to the aspects of the story involving the media, and asked that his name be removed from the credits. Tarantino was credited with "Story By" on the final film.
In 1997, a book about the making of the film, Killer Instinct was written by Jane Hamsher and published by Broadway Books. The book was well reviewed and sold well in Hollywood. It told of an out of control Stone making the film.
In 2003, Stone travelled to Cuba where he interviewed Fidel Castro for three days. The result was the documentary Comandante where Stone and Castro talk about philosophy, history, movie stars, Che Guevara, important events from the past 50 years and Castro's views on the future of the revolution. The film was scheduled to air in May 2003 on HBO but was put on hold after an incident where hijackers threatened to kill passengers on a Cuban ferry if they were not taken to the United States. The hijackers were subsequently executed and in response to loud protests from the Miami Cuban lobby HBO pulled the film.[citation needed] To this day it has not been released in the United States and is only available on imported DVDs from Britain. Stone returned to Cuba and shot Looking for Fidel, which is a more politically-focused documentary dealing with conditions on the island and the relationship between Cuba and the United States. That film was aired on HBO in early 2004. Stone has said he admires the Cuban Revolution and supports Cuba's rights as a sovereign nation free from U.S. influence.
In December 2006, Stone shocked audiences at the British Comedy Awards by making a joke in reference to the Suffolk Strangler, a serial killer of prostitutes still on the loose. He said "It's great to be back in England. I feel like Jack The Ripper days are back. Nothing ever changes here." In response to the audience reaction he added "you're a lovely crowd."

Drug use
Stone loosely based Scarface on his own addiction to cocaine which he had to kick while writing the screenplay.[14]
Stone has been rumored to use drugs while making films. On the DVD of Natural Born Killers: The Director's Cut, one of the producers, Jane Hamsher, recounts stories of taking psilocybin mushrooms with Stone and some of the cast and crew and almost getting pulled over by a police officer—a situation which Stone later wrote into the film.
In 1999, Stone was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug possession and no contest to driving under the influence. He was ordered into a rehabilitation program. He was arrested again on the night of May 27, 2005 in Los Angeles for possession of a small amount of marijuana.[15]

Attempted meeting with FARC
See also: Operation Emmanuel
In a January 2008 interview with The Observer, Stone expressed disgust for the ongoing presumed U.S.-supported paramilitary violence in Colombia's "war on drugs". He accompanied Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president and self-appointed negotiator with the Colombian guerilla group known as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in the release of three hostages held for over six years, another episode in the Humanitarian Exchange affair.
The visit was part of his research for an upcoming film he will be directing which addresses the crisis.[16] The FARC, designated a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, was described in a 2005 United Nations report as responsible for "grave" human rights violations, including "murders of protected persons, torture and hostage-taking¨ against ¨women, returnees, boys and girls, and ethnic groups."[17] During The Observer interview, Stone refused to condemn the FARC outright, but seemingly supported them. "I do think that by the standards of Western civilization they go too far; they kidnap innocent people. On the other hand, they're fighting a desperate battle against highly financed, American-supported forces who have been terrorising the countryside for years and kill most of the people. Farc is fighting back as best it can and grabbing hostages is the fashion in which they can finance themselves and try to achieve their goals, which are difficult. They're a peasant army; I see them as a Zapata-like army. I think they are heroic to fight for what they believe in and die for it, as was Castro in the hills of Cuba."Stone made the comments shortly after returning from a trip to Colombia, where he was to have filmed footage of the expected release of three FARC hostages, including a young child named Emanuel. While two of the hostages were liberated after the international commission appointed to oversee it was disbanded because of non-compliance by FARC to deliver the exact location of the three hostages, it was subsequently revealed that the FARC could not have released the child because they no longer held him. Instead the child had been placed in foster care and subsequently adopted by the Colombian welfare system (the ICBF) because of signs of child abuse. Some commentators surmised that the purported hostage release had been a FARC ruse all along.Nevertheless, Stone blamed the Colombian government and the United States for the fiasco.The incident caused a wave of comments on Oliver Stone's official website, mostly by Colombian citizens who were noticeably upset with what was perceived as his support for FARC.

Other work
In 1993, Stone produced a mini series for ABC Television called Wild Palms. In a cameo, Stone appears on a television in the show discussing how the theories in his film JFK had been proven correct (the series took place in a hypothetical future, 2007). Wild Palms has developed a moderate cult following in the years since it aired, and has recently been released on DVD. That same year, he also spoofed himself in the comedy hit Dave, espousing a conspiracy theory about the President's replacement by a near-identical double.
In 1997, Stone published A Child's Night Dream, a largely autobiographical novel first written in 1966-1967. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the work published, he "threw several sections of the manuscript into the East River one cold night, and, as if surgically removing the memory of the book from my mind, volunteered for Vietnam in 1967." Eventually, he dug out the remaining pages, rewrote the manuscript, and published it. The book is almost a stream of consciousness telling of his experiences as a child, in college, and in Vietnam.
In 2003, Stone made two documentary films: Persona Non Grata, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Comandante, about Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 2004, he made a second documentary on Castro, titled Looking for Fidel. (See also Controversy, above.)
Stone is said to be directing a short film about the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where the games were held.
He was recently admitted permission by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make a documentary about him. Stone had been previously refused permission by the Iranian government when the President's media advisor, Mehdi Kalhor, denounced Stoneas being part of the "Great Satan" of American culture, despite his opposition to the Bush administration. He said "It is right that this person [Stone] is considered part of the opposition in the US, but opposition in the U.S. is a part of the great satan. We believe that the American cinema lacks culture and art." Stone reacted with outrage, saying "I have been called a lot of things, but never a great satan. I wish the Iranian people well, and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours." However, Ahmadinejad approved permission a month later, saying he had "no objections" provided the documentary was based on accurate facts. Stone is due to visit Tehran to negotiate the production of the film with Iranian officials, possibly the president himself.

Future projects
He is set to direct four new movies: a film based on the novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; Memphis, a movie focusing on the events leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968; Jawbreaker, the story of America's response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for Osama bin Laden; and Son of the Morning Star, a movie about General Custer's battle with President Ulysses S. Grant over military corruption and Custer's potential bid for the White House.
Meanwhile, the future of Pinkville remains currently unknown, though Stone is expected to return to the project, following the completion of W.
However, in 2007, Stone was reported to have turned down an invitation to direct a sequel to Wall Street. Original star Charlie Sheen will also be absent, but Michael Douglas is expected to reprise his role as Gordon Gekko.

Filmography
Last Year in Viet Nam (1971, short)
Seizure (also known as Queen of Evil, 1974)
Midnight Express (screenwriter) (1978)
Mad Man of Martinique (1979, short)
The Hand (1981)
Conan the Barbarian (screenwriter) (1982)
Scarface (screenwriter) (1983)
Year of the Dragon (screenwriter) (1985)
8 Million Ways to Die (screenwriter) (1986)
Salvador (1986)
Platoon (1986)
Wall Street (1987)
Talk Radio (1988)
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
The Doors (1991)
JFK (1991)
Dave (cameo) (1993)
Heaven & Earth (1993)
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Nixon (1995)
Evita (screenwriter) (1996)
U-Turn (1997)
Any Given Sunday (1999)
The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001)
Persona Non Grata (2003)
Comandante (2003)
Alexander (2004)
Looking for Fidel (2004)
World Trade Center (2006)
W. (2008)

George Lucas

Born
George Walton Lucas, Jr.May 14, 1944 (1944-05-14) (age 64)Modesto, California, U.S.
Years active
1965 - present
Spouse(s)
Marcia Griffin (1969-1983)
Domestic partner(s)
Mellody Hobson (2007-)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award1992 Lifetime Achievement
BAFTA Awards
Britannia Award2002 Excellence in Film
Golden Globe Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy1973 American Graffiti
Golden Raspberry Awards
Worst Screenplay2002 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Other awards
NSFC Award for Best Screenplay1973 American GraffitiNYFCC Award for Best Screenplay1973 American GraffitiSaturn Award for Best Direction1977 Star WarsSaturn Award for Best Writing1977 Star WarsAFI Life Achievement Award2005 Lifetime Achievement
George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an Academy Award-winning American film director, producer, screenwriter and chairman of Lucasfilm. He is the creator of the epic space opera saga Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Today, Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful independent directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion.[1]
Biography

Early life and education
Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.[2] His father was mainly of British and Swiss-German heritage and his mother, a member of a prominent Modesto family (one of her cousins is the mother of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and director of UNICEF Ann Veneman), was mainly of German and Scots-Irish heritage.
His parents sold retail office supplies and owned a walnut ranch in California. His experiences growing up in the sleepy suburb of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Before young Lucas became obsessed with the movie camera, he wanted to be a race car driver, but a near fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina just days before his high school graduation quickly changed his mind. Instead, he attended community college and developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks.
During this time an experimental filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses.
These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.
"That's when George really started exploring," Plummer recalls. "We went to a theater on Union Street that showed art movies, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been a D-plus slacker in high school.
At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.
Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich who had been a colleague of Sergei Eisenstein's before moving to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.
Lucas saw many inspiring movies in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, the French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinéma vérité 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cinema verite with such titles as Look At Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, filmmaker, and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema. After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but was turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army, but tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather. Lucas was prescribed medication for the disease, but his symptoms are sufficiently mild that he does not require insulin and would not be considered diabetic under the disease's current classification.[dubious – discuss][4]
In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe the making of Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had "made it".

Film career

Kelly Hu with George Lucas, Willow Springs Raceway, CA. The shirt worn by Lucas says, "Han shot first."
Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola—whom he met during his internship at Warner Brothers—hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system. His first full-length feature film produced by the studio, THX1138 was not a success, but his second was: American Graffiti (1973). He then proposed a new Flash Gordon film adaptation, but the rights were not available. But his new-found wealth and reputation enabled him to develop a story set in space instead. Even so he encountered difficulties getting Star Wars made. It was only because Alan Ladd, Jr. at Fox Studios liked American Graffiti that he forced through a production and distribution deal for the film, which ended up restoring Fox to financial stability after a number of flops.[5]
On a return on investment basis, Star Wars proved to be one of the most successful films of all time. During the filming of Star Wars, Lucas waived his up front fee as director and negotiated to own the licensing rights — rights which the studio thought were nearly worthless. This decision earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, as he was able to directly profit from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.
Meanwhile, under the American Zoetrope banner Lucas developed Apocalypse Now to direct after Star Wars, but work on the latter film dragged on, so Coppola took over directing Apocalypse Now, leading to the breakdown of the American Zoetrope partnership. However the money from Star Wars enabled Lucas to set up his own studio, Lucasfilm, in Marin County in his native Northern California. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields. Lucasfilm Games, later renamed to LucasArts, is highly regarded in the gaming industry.
The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Pixar's early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan[6] and Young Sherlock Holmes,[6] and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer. Jobs paid U.S. $5 million to Lucas and put U.S. $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas' desire to stop the cash flow losses associated with his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company's new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash flow difficulties following Lucas' 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden drop off in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi. (Some twenty years later on January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it had agreed to buy Pixar for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal.)
Lucas was also influential in the development of industry-standard post-production tools such as the Avid Film and Video nonlinear editor, first developed as the Edit Droid, and also the Sound Droid, which later became the Digidesign Pro Tools sound editing and mixing software.
Lucas and director Steven Spielberg enjoy a friendship that dates to their college years, and that has resulted in collaborations on films including the Indiana Jones movies Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
On October 3, 1994, Lucas started to write the three Star Wars prequels, and on November 1 that year, he left the day-to-day operations of his filmmaking business and started a sabbatical to finish the prequels.
In 2006 Forbes Magazine estimated Lucas' personal wealth at US$ 3.5 billion. In 2005 Forbes.com estimated the lifetime revenue generated by the Star Wars franchise at nearly $20 billion.
He recently announced that he would produce a TV series about Star Wars, which would take place between episodes III and IV. Lucas purportedly also recently announced that he plans on making two additional Star Wars films that will take place after The Return of the Jedi, but this rumor was debunked at Star Wars Celebration 4 in Los Angeles, California which took place May 24th-May 28th, 2007. When Steve Sansweet, Director of Content Management and Head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm, was asked about the proposed two films post-Return of the Jedi he stated that it was a misunderstanding of what Lucas was explaining. According to Sansweet, Lucas was referring to the two Star Wars television projects currently in production: Star Wars: Clone Wars which is a CG animated show set to debut in the Fall of 2008, and the yet to be titled Star Wars live action television series set to debut in 2009.

Awards, donations and other activities
In 1991, The George Lucas Educational Foundation was founded as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools. The Foundation's content is available under the brand Edutopia, in an award-winning magazine, and via documentary films. Lucas, though his foundation, was one of the leading proponents of the E-rate program in the universal service fund,[7] which was enacted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. On June 24, 2008, Lucas testified before the United States House of Representatives subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet as the head of his Foundation to advocate for a free wireless broadband educational network

The American Film Institute awarded Lucas its Life Achievement Award on June 9, 2005.[9] This was shortly after the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, to which he jokingly made reference in his acceptance speech, stating that, since he views the entire Star Wars series as one movie, he could actually receive the award now that he had finally "gone back and finished the movie."
On June 5, 2005, Lucas was named 100th "Greatest American" by the Discovery Channel.
Lucas was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Directing and Writing for American Graffiti, and Best Directing and Writing for Star Wars. He also received the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1991. He appeared at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007 with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to present the Best Director award to their friend Martin Scorsese. During the speech, Spielberg and Coppola talked about the joy of winning an Oscar, making fun of Lucas, who has not won a competitive Oscar.
In 2005, Lucas gave US$1 million to help build the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to commemorate American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.[10]

Lucas at the Time 100 2006 gala
On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated $175 million to his alma mater to expand the film school. It is the largest single donation to USC and the largest gift to a film school.Previous donations led to the already existing George Lucas Instructional Building and Marcia Lucas Post-Production building

On January 1, 2007 George Lucas served as the Grand Marshal for the 2007 Tournament of Roses Parade, and made the coin toss at the 2007 Rose Bowl. The toss favored Lucas's alma mater, the Trojans. His team, which came into the game as underdogs, went on to defeat the Michigan Wolverines (32-18).

Personal life
In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Oscar for her editing work on the original (Episode IV) Star Wars film. They adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981, and divorced in 1983. Lucas has since adopted two more children: Katie, born in 1988, and Jett, born in 1993. All three of his children have appeared in the prequels, as has Lucas himself. Lucas had also been in a long relationship and engaged with singer Linda Ronstadt. He has been dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Capital Management, since 2007 and she has accompanied him to several events including the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, an American Film Institute event in October 2007 and the 2008 Cannes Film Festival held in May

Lucas was born and raised in a strongly Methodist family. After inserting religious themes into Star Wars he would eventually come to identify strongly with the Eastern religious philosophies he studied and incorporated into his movies, which were a major inspiration for "the Force." Lucas eventually came to state that his religion was "Buddhist Methodist." Lucas resides in Marin CountyHis favorite TV show is the hit FOX animated television series Family Guy. His company Lucasfilm had been very supportive of the show whenever the producers of Family Guy wanted to parody their works, since they, including creator Seth MacFarlane, are big fans of the Star Wars saga. Lucas revealed to MacFarlane that he and his family had completely filled up their TiVo with every single episode of Family Guy without having to buy the DVDs. In addition, the only other series he watches is Jackass.
Filmography
Year
Title
Other Notes
2008
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Producer, co-writer
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Story, executive producer
2005
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Writer and Director, executive producer, actor(cameo)
2002
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Co-Writer and Director, executive producer
1999
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Writer and Director, executive producer
1994
Radioland Murders
Co-Writer, executive producer
1989
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Co-Writer, executive producer
1988
The Land Before Time
Executive producer
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
Executive producer
Willow
Co-Writer, executive producer
Powaqqatsi
Executive producer
1986
Captain EO
Co-Writer, executive producer
Howard the Duck
Executive producer
1985
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor
Co-Writer, executive producer
1984
Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure
Co-Writer, executive producer
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Co-Writer, executive producer
1983
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Co-Writer, executive producer
1981
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Co-Writer, executive producer
1980
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Story, executive producer
1979
More American Graffiti
Executive producer
1977
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Writer and Director, executive producer
1973
American Graffiti
Co-Writer, Director
1971
THX 1138
Co-Writer, Director

Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin in costume as The Tramp
Born
Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr.16 April 1889 (1889 -04-16)Walworth, London, England
Died
25 December 1977 (aged 88)Vevey, Switzerland
Occupation
Actor, Director
Years active
1914 - 1976[1]
Spouse(s)
Mildred Harris (1918-20)Lita Grey (1924-28)Paulette Goddard (1936-42)Oona O'Neill (1943-77)
[show]Awards won
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award1929 The Circus1972 Lifetime AchievementBest Original Music Score1952 Limelight
Other awards
NYFCC Award for Best Actor1940 The Great DictatorCareer Golden Lion1972 Lifetime Achievement
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977), better known as Charlie Chaplin, was an Academy Award-winning English comedic actor. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid Hollywood cinema era. He is considered one of the finest mimes and clowns ever captured on film. He greatly influenced other performers.
Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced, and eventually scored his own films as one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. His working life in entertainment spanned over 65 years, from the Victorian stage and the Music Hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer almost until his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith Chaplin co-founded United Artists in 1919.
Chaplin's principal character was "The Tramp" (known as "Charlot" in France, and the French-speaking world, Italy, Spain, Andorra, Portugal, Greece, Romania, and Turkey, "Carlitos" in Brazil and Argentina, and "Vagabund" in Germany). "The Tramp" is a vagrant with the refined manners and dignity of a gentleman. The character wears a tight coat, oversized trousers and shoes, and a derby; carries a bamboo cane; and has a signature toothbrush moustache.

Early life

Chaplin,c. 1920
Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889, in East Street, Walworth, London. His parents were both entertainers in the music hall tradition; they separated before Charlie was three. He learned singing from his parents. The 1891 census shows that his mother, the actress Lily Harvey (Hannah Harriet Hill), lived with Charlie and his older brother Sydney on Barlow Street, Walworth. As a child Charlie also lived with his mother in various addresses in and around Kennington Road in Lambeth, including 3 Pownall Terrace, Chester Street, and 39 Methley Street. His maternal grandmother was half-Roma, a fact of which he was extremely proud,[2] but also described as "the skeleton in our family cupboard".[3] Chaplin's father, Charles Chaplin, Sr, was an alcoholic and had little contact with his son, though Chaplin and his brother briefly lived with their father and his mistress, Louise, at 287 Kennington Road where a plaque now commemorates the fact. The brothers lived there while their mentally ill mother resided at Cane Hill Asylum at Coulsdon. Chaplin's father's mistress sent the boy to Kennington Road School. His father died of alcoholism when Charlie was twelve in 1901. As of the 1901 Census, Charles resided at 94 Ferndale Road, Lambeth, with the The Eight Lancashire Lads, led by John William Jackson (the 17 year old son of one of the founders).
A larynx condition ended the singing career of Chaplin's mother. Hannah's first crisis came in 1894 when she was performing at The Canteen, a theatre in Aldershot. The theatre was mainly frequented by rioters and soldiers. Hannah was badly injured by the objects the audience threw at her and she was booed off the stage. Backstage, she cried and argued with her manager. Meanwhile, the five-year old Chaplin went on stage alone and sang a well-known tune at that time, "Jack Jones".
After Hannah Chaplin was again admitted to the Cane Hill Asylum, her son was left in the workhouse at Lambeth in south London, moving after several weeks to the Central London District School for paupers in Hanwell. The young Chaplin brothers forged a close relationship in order to survive. They gravitated to the Music Hall while still very young, and both of them proved to have considerable natural stage talent. Chaplin's early years of desperate poverty were a great influence on his characters. Themes in his films in later years would re-visit the scenes of his childhood deprivation in Lambeth.
Chaplin's mother died in 1928 in Hollywood, seven years after having been brought to the U.S. by her sons. Unknown to Charlie and Sydney until years later, they had a half-brother through their mother. The boy, Wheeler Dryden, was raised abroad by his father but later connected with the rest of the family and went to work for Chaplin at his Hollywood studio.

America

Making a Living (1914), Chaplin's film debut.
Chaplin first toured America with the Fred Karno troupe from 1910 to 1912. After five months back in England, he returned to the U.S. for a second tour, arriving with the Karno Troupe on 2 October 1912. In the Karno Company was Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who would later become known as Stan Laurel. Chaplin and Laurel shared a room in a boarding house. Stan Laurel returned to England but Chaplin remained in the United States. In late 1913, Chaplin's act with the Karno Troupe was seen by film producer Mack Sennett, who hired him for his studio, the Keystone Film Company. Chaplin's first film appearance was in Making a Living a one-reel comedy released on 2 February 1914. At Keystone Studios, Chaplin became an instant success.[4] Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest in San Francisco and, quite humorously, could not make it to the final round.[5]

Pioneering film artist

Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914): Chaplin's second film and the début of his "tramp" costume.
Chaplin's earliest films were made for Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, where he developed his tramp character and very quickly learned the art and craft of film making. The tramp was first presented to the public when Chaplin was age 24 in his second film Kid Auto Races at Venice (released Feb. 7, 1914) though Mabel's Strange Predicament, his third film, (released Feb. 9,1914) was produced a few days before. It was for this film that Chaplin first conceived of the tramp. The character would immediately gain huge popularity among theater audiences.[4] As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography:
"I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression.
I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born." (Chaplin, My Autobiography: pp.154).
Chaplin's early Keystones use the standard Mack Sennett formula of extreme physical comedy and exaggerated gestures. Chaplin's pantomime was subtler, more suitable to romantic and domestic farces than to the usual Keystone chases and mob scenes. The visual gags were pure Keystone, however; the tramp character would aggressively assault his enemies with kicks and bricks. Moviegoers loved this cheerfully earthy new comedian, even though critics warned that his antics bordered on vulgarity. Chaplin was soon entrusted with directing and editing his own films. He made 34 shorts for Sennett during his first year in pictures, as well as the landmark comedy feature Tillie's Punctured Romance.
The Tramp character was featured in the first movie trailer to be exhibited in a U.S. movie theater, a slide promotion developed by Nils Granlund, advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theater chain, and shown at the Loew's Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem in 1914.[6]
In 1915, Chaplin signed a much more favorable contract with Essanay Studios, and further developed his cinematic skills, adding new levels of depth and pathos to the Keystone-style slapstick. Most of the Essanay films were more ambitious, running twice as long as the average Keystone comedy. Chaplin also developed his own stock company, including ingenue Edna Purviance and comic villains Leo White and Bud Jamison.
In 1916, the Mutual Film Corporation paid Chaplin US$670,000 to produce a dozen two-reel comedies. He was given near complete artistic control, and produced twelve films over an eighteen-month period that rank among the most influential comedy films in cinema. Practically every Mutual comedy is a classic: Easy Street, One AM, The Pawnshop, and The Adventurer are perhaps the best known. Edna Purviance remained the leading lady, and Chaplin added Eric Campbell, Henry Bergman, and Albert Austin to his stock company; Campbell, a Gilbert and Sullivan veteran, provided superb villainy, and second bananas Bergman and Austin would remain with Chaplin for decades. Chaplin regarded the Mutual period as the happiest of his career, although he also had concerns that the films during that time were becoming formulaic owing to the stringent production schedule his contract required. Upon the U.S. entering World War I, Chaplin became a spokesman for Liberty Bonds with his close friend Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.[4]
Most of the Chaplin films in circulation date from his Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual periods. After Chaplin assumed control of his productions in 1918 (and kept exhibitors and audiences waiting for them), entrepreneurs serviced the demand for Chaplin by bringing back his older comedies. The films were recut, retitled, and reissued again and again, first for theatres, then for the home-movie market, and in recent years, for home video. Even Essanay was guilty of this practice, fashioning "new" Chaplin comedies from old film clips and out-takes. The twelve Mutual comedies were revamped as sound movies in 1933, when producer Amadee J. Van Beuren added new orchestral scores and sound effects. A listing of the dozens of Chaplin films and alternate versions can be found in the Ted Okuda-David Maska book Charlie Chaplin at Keystone and Essanay: Dawn of the Tramp. Efforts to produce definitive versions of Chaplin's pre-1918 short films have been underway in recent years; all twelve Mutual films were restored in 1975 by archivist David Shepard and Blackhawk Films, and new restorations with even more footage were released on DVD in 2006.

Filmmaking Techniques
Chaplin never spoke more than cursorily about his filmmaking methods, claiming such a thing would be tantamount to a magician spoiling his own illusion. In fact, until he began making spoken dialogue films with The Great Dictator, Chaplin never shot from a completed script. The method he developed, once his Essanay contract gave him the freedom to write for and direct himself, was to start from a vague premise - e.g., "Charlie enters a health spa" or "Charlie works in a pawn shop." Chaplin then had sets constructed and worked with his stock company to improvise gags and "business" around them, almost always working the ideas out on film. As ideas were accepted and discarded, a narrative structure would emerge, frequently requiring Chaplin to reshoot an already-completed scene that might have otherwise contradicted the story.[7] Chaplin's unique filmaking techniques became known only after his death, when his rare surviving outakes and cut sequences were carefully examined in the 1983 British documentary Unknown Chaplin.
This is one reason why Chaplin took so much longer to complete his films than did his rivals. In addition, Chaplin was an incredibly exacting director, showing his actors exactly how he wanted them to perform and shooting scores of takes until he had the shot he wanted. (Animator Chuck Jones, who lived near Charlie Chaplin's Lone Star studio as a boy, remembered his father saying he watched Chaplin shoot a scene more than a hundred times until he was satisfied with it.[8]) This combination of story improvisation and relentless perfectionism - which resulted in days of effort and thousands of feet of film being wasted, all at enormous expense - often proved very taxing for Chaplin, who in frustration would often lash out at his actors and crew, keep them waiting idly for hours or, in extreme cases, shutting down production altogether.[7]

Creative control

Charlie Chaplin Studios, 1922
At the conclusion of the Mutual contract in 1917, Chaplin signed a contract with First National to produce eight two-reel films. First National financed and distributed these pictures (1918-23) but otherwise gave him complete creative control over production which he could perform at a more relaxed pace that allowed him to focus on quality. Chaplin built his own Hollywood studio and using his independence, created a remarkable, timeless body of work that remains entertaining and influential. Although First National expected Chaplin to deliver short comedies like the celebrated Mutuals, Chaplin ambitiously expanded most of his personal projects into longer, feature-length films, including Shoulder Arms (1918), The Pilgrim (1923), and the feature-length classic The Kid (1921).
In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the United Artists film distribution company with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, all of whom were seeking to escape the growing power consolidation of film distributors and financiers in the developing Hollywood studio system. This move, along with complete control of his film production through his studio, assured Chaplin's independence as a film-maker. He served on the board of UA until the early 1950s.
All Chaplin's United Artists pictures were of feature length, beginning with the atypical drama in which Chaplin had only a brief cameo role, A Woman of Paris (1923). This was followed by the classic comedies The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).
After the arrival of sound films, Chaplin made City Lights (1931), as well as Modern Times (1936) before he committed to sound. These were essentially silent films scored with his own music and sound effects. City Lights contained arguably his most perfect balance of comedy and sentimentality. Of the final scene, critic James Agee wrote in Life magazine in 1949 that it was the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid".
Chaplin's dialogue films made in Hollywood were The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952).
While Modern Times (1936) is a non-talkie, it does contain talk — usually coming from inanimate objects such as a radio or a TV monitor. This was done to help 1930s audiences, who were out of the habit of watching silent films, adjust to not hearing dialogue. Modern Times was the first film where Chaplin's voice is heard (in the nonsense song at the end, being both written and performed by Chaplin). However, for most viewers it is still considered a silent film — and the end of an era.
Although "talkies" became the dominant mode of movie making soon after they were introduced in 1927, Chaplin resisted making such a film all through the 1930s. He considered cinema essentially a pantomimic art. He said: "Action is more generally understood than words. Like Chinese symbolism, it will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a description of some unfamiliar object — an African wart hog, for example; then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are (Time Magazine, 9 February 1931)."
It is a tribute to Chaplin's versatility that he also has one film credit for choreography for the 1952 film Limelight, and another as a singer for the title music of The Circus (1928). The best known of several songs he composed are "Smile", composed for the film Modern Times and given lyrics to help promote a 1950s revival of the film, famously covered by Nat King Cole. "This Is My Song" from Chaplin's last film, "A Countess From Hong Kong," was a number one hit in several different languages in the 1960s (most notably the version by Petula Clark and discovery of an unreleased version in the 1990s recorded in 1967 by Judith Durham of The Seekers), and Chaplin's theme from Limelight was a hit in the 1950s under the title "Eternally." Chaplin's score to Limelight was nominated for an Academy Award in 1972 due to a decades-long delay in the film premiering in Los Angeles making it eligible.

The Great Dictator
Chaplin's first dialogue picture, The Great Dictator (1940), was an act of defiance against German dictator Adolf Hitler and Nazism, filmed and released in the United States one year before the U.S. abandoned its policy of isolationism to enter World War II. Chaplin played the role of a Hitler-like dictator "Adenoid Hynkel",[9] Dictator of Tomainia, clearly modeled on Hitler. The film also showcased comedian Jack Oakie as "Benzino Napaloni", dictator of Bacteria. The Napaloni character was clearly a jab at Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Fascism.
Paulette Goddard filmed with Chaplin again, depicting a woman in the ghetto. The film was seen as an act of courage in the political environment of the time, both for its ridicule of Nazism and for the portrayal of overt Jewish characters and the depiction of their persecution. Chaplin played both the role of Adenoid Hynkel and also that of a look-alike Jewish barber persecuted by the Nazis. The barber physically resembles Chaplin's Tramp character, but is not considered to be the Tramp. At the conclusion, the two characters Chaplin portrayed swapped positions through a complex plot, and he dropped out of his comic character to address the audience directly in a speech.

Politics

Chaplin together with the American socialist Max Eastman in Hollywood 1919.
Chaplin's political sympathies always lay with the left. His politics seem moderate by some contemporary standards, but in the 1940s his views (in conjunction with his influence, fame, and status in the United States as a resident foreigner) were seen by many as communistic. His silent films made prior to the Great Depression typically did not contain overt political themes or messages, apart from the Tramp's plight in poverty and his run-ins with the law, but his 1930s films were more openly political. Modern Times depicts workers and poor people in dismal conditions. The final dramatic speech in The Great Dictator, which was critical of following patriotic nationalism without question, and his vocal public support for the opening of a second European front in 1942 to assist the Soviet Union in World War II were controversial. In at least one of those speeches, according to a contemporary account in the Daily Worker, he intimated that Communism might sweep the world after World War II and equated it with human progress.
Apart from the controversial 1942 speeches, Chaplin declined to support the war effort as he had done for the First World War which led to public anger, although his two sons saw service in the Army in Europe. For most of World War II he was fighting serious criminal and civil charges related to his involvement with actress Joan Barry (see below). After the war, the critical view towards what he regarded as capitalism in his 1947 black comedy, Monsieur Verdoux led to increased hostility, with the film being the subject of protests in many U.S. cities. As a result, Chaplin's final American film, Limelight, was less political and more autobiographical in nature. His following European-made film, A King in New York (1957), satirized the political persecution and paranoia that had forced him to leave the U.S. five years earlier. After this film, Chaplin lost interest in making overt political statements, later saying that comedians and clowns should be "above politics".

McCarthy era
Although Chaplin had his major successes in the United States and was a resident from 1914 to 1953, he always maintained a neutral nationalistic stance. During the era of McCarthyism, Chaplin was accused of "un-American activities" as a suspected communist sympathizer and J. Edgar Hoover, who had instructed the FBI to keep extensive secret files on him, tried to end his United States residency. FBI pressure on Chaplin grew after his 1942 campaign for a second European front in the war and reached a critical level in the late 1940s, when Congressional figures threatened to call him as a witness in hearings. This was never done, probably from fear of Chaplin's ability to lampoon the investigators.[10] This was probably a wise decision, as Chaplin later stated that, if called, he wanted to appear dressed in his Tramp costume.[citation needed]
In 1952, Chaplin left the US for what was intended as a brief trip home to the United Kingdom for the London premiere of Limelight. Hoover learned of the trip and negotiated with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to revoke Chaplin's re-entry permit. Chaplin decided not to re-enter the United States, writing; ".....Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."[11]
Chaplin then made his home in Vevey, Switzerland. He briefly and triumphantly returned to the United States in April 1972, with his wife, to receive an Honorary Oscar, and was welcomed warmly.

Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921)

Academy Awards
Chaplin won one Oscar in a competitive category, and was given two honorary Academy Awards.

Competitive award
In 1972, Chaplin won an Oscar for the Best Music in an Original Dramatic Score for the 1952 film Limelight, which co-starred Claire Bloom. The film also features an appearance with Buster Keaton, which was the only time the two great comedians ever appeared together. Due to Chaplin's political difficulties, the film did not play a one-week theatrical engagement in Los Angeles when it was first produced. This criterion for nomination was unfulfilled until 1972.
Chaplin was also nominated for Best Comedy Director for The Circus in 1929, for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay (although the Academy no longer lists these nominations in their official records because he received a Special Award instead of being included in the final voting for the competitive ones), Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for The Great Dictator in 1940, and again for Best Original Screenplay for Monsieur Verdoux in 1948. During his active years as a filmmaker, Chaplin expressed disdain for the Academy Awards; his son Charles Jr wrote that Chaplin invoked the ire of the Academy in the 1930s by jokingly using his 1929 Oscar as a doorstop. This may help explain why City Lights and Modern Times, considered by several polls to be two of the greatest of all motion pictures,[12][13] were not nominated for a single Academy Award.

Honorary awards
When the first Oscars were awarded on 16 May 1929, the voting audit procedures that now exist had not yet been put into place, and the categories were still very fluid. Chaplin had originally been nominated for both Best Actor and Best Comedy Directing for his movie The Circus, but his name was withdrawn and the Academy decided to give him a special award "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus" instead. The other film to receive a special award that year was The Jazz Singer.
Chaplin's second honorary award came forty-four years later in 1972, and was for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century". He came out of his exile to accept his award, and received the longest standing ovation in Academy Award history, lasting a full five minutes.

Final works

Statue of Chaplin in Leicester Square, London.
Chaplin's final two films were made in London: A King in New York (1957) in which he starred, wrote, directed and produced; and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), which he directed, produced, and wrote. The latter film stars Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, and Chaplin made his final on-screen appearance in a brief cameo role as a seasick steward. He also composed the music for both films with the theme song from A Countess From Hong Kong, "This is My Song," reaching number one in England as sung by Petula Clark. Chaplin also compiled a film The Chaplin Revue from three First National films A Dog's Life (1918), Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Pilgrim (1923) for which he composed the music and recorded an introductary narration. As well as directing these final films, Chaplin also wrote My Autobiography, between 1959 and 1963, which was published in 1964.
In his pictorial autobiography My Life In Pictures, published in 1974, Chaplin indicated that he had written a screenplay for his daughter, Victoria; entitled The Freak, the film would have cast her as an angel. According to Chaplin, a script was completed and pre-production rehearsals had begun on the film (the book includes a photograph of Victoria in costume), but were halted when Victoria married. "I mean to make it some day," Chaplin wrote. However, his health declined steadily in the 1970s which hampered all hopes of the film ever been produced.
From 1969 until 1976, Chaplin wrote original music compositions and scores for his silent pictures and re-released them. He composed the scores of all his First National shorts: The Idle Class in 1971 (paired with The Kid for re-release in 1972), A Day's Pleasure in 1973, Pay Day in 1972, Sunnyside in 1974, and of his feature length films firstly The Circus in 1969 and The Kid in 1971. Chaplin worked with music associate Eric James whilst composing all his scores.
Chaplin's last completed work was the score for his 1923 film A Woman of Paris, which was completed in 1976, by which time Chaplin was extremely frail, even finding communication difficult.

Relationships with women, marriages and children

Hetty Kelly
Hetty Kelly was Chaplin's 'true' first love, a dancer with whom he "instantly" fell in love when she was fifteen and almost married when she was nineteen. At the time Kelly was performing before him in a London music hall and Chaplin asked if she would meet him the following weekend; she agreed.[citation needed] It is said Chaplin fell madly in love with her and asked her to marry him. When she refused, Chaplin suggested it would be best if they did not see each other again; he was reportedly crushed when she agreed. Years later, her memory would remain a 'fetish' with Chaplin. He was devastated in 1921 when he learned that she had died of influenza during the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918. There is a small controversy over whether or not Chaplin and Kelly had a child; if so, the child has yet to be brought to light.

Edna Purviance

Edna Purviance
Chaplin and his first major leading lady, Edna Purviance, were involved in a close romantic relationship during the production of his Essanay and Mutual films in 1916–1917. The romance seems to have ended by 1918, and Chaplin's marriage to Mildred Harris in late 1918 ended any possibility of reconciliation. Purviance would continue as leading lady in Chaplin's films until 1923, and would remain on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958. She and Chaplin spoke warmly of one another for the rest of their lives.

Mildred Harris

Mildred Harris, c. 1918 - 1920.
On 23 October 1918, Chaplin, age 29, married the popular child-actress, Mildred Harris, age 16. They had one son, Norman Spencer Chaplin (also known as "The Little Mouse"), born 7 July 1919, who died three days later. Chaplin separated from Harris by late 1919, moving back into the Los Angeles Athletic Club.[14] The couple divorced in November, 1920, with Harris getting some of their community property and a US$100,000 settlement.[14] Chaplin admitted that he "was not in love, now that [he] was married [he] wanted to be and wanted the marriage to be a success." During the divorce, Chaplin claimed Harris had an affair with noted actress of the time Alla Nazimova, rumoured to be fond of seducing young actresses.[15]

Pola Negri
Chaplin was involved in a very public relationship and engagement to the Polish actress Pola Negri in 1922–23, after she arrived in Hollywood to star in films. The stormy on-off engagement was halted after about nine months, but in many ways it foreshadowed the modern stereotypes of Hollywood star relationships. Chaplin's public involvement with Negri was unique in his public life. By comparison he strove to keep his other romances and relationships very discreet and private (usually without success). Many biographers have concluded the affair with Negri was largely for publicity purposes.

Marion Davies
In 1924, during the time he was involved with the underage Lita Grey, Chaplin was rumored to have had a fling with actress Marion Davies, companion of William Randolph Hearst. Davies and Chaplin were both present on Hearst's yacht the weekend preceding the mysterious death of Thomas Harper Ince. Charlie allegedly tried to persuade Marion to leave Hearst and remain with him, but she refused and stayed by Hearst's side until his death in 1951. Chaplin made a rare cameo appearance in Davies' 1928 film Show People, and by some accounts supposedly continued an affair with her until 1931.

Lita Grey
Chaplin first met Lita Grey during the filming of The Kid. Three years later, at age 35, he became involved with the then 16-year-old Grey during preparations for The Gold Rush in which she was to star as the female lead. They married on 26 November 1924, after she became pregnant (a development that resulted in her being removed from the cast of the film). They had two sons, the actors Charles Chaplin Jr. (1925–1968) and Sydney Earle Chaplin (1926–). The marriage was a disaster, with the couple hopelessly mismatched. The couple divorced on 22 August 1927.[16] Their extraordinarily bitter divorce had Chaplin paying Grey a then-record-breaking US$825,000 settlement, on top of almost one million dollars in legal costs. The stress of the sensational divorce, compounded by a federal tax dispute, allegedly turned his hair white. The Chaplin biographer Joyce Milton asserted in Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin that the Grey-Chaplin marriage was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's 1950s novel Lolita. This allegation runs contrary to recent scholarship on Nabokov literature, namely the discovery of the 1916 Lolita novel by Heinz von Eschwege.

Georgia Hale
Grey's replacement on The Gold Rush was Georgia Hale. In the documentary series, Unknown Chaplin, Hale, in a 1980s interview states that she had idolized Chaplin since childhood and that the then-19-year-old actress and Chaplin began an affair that continued for several years, which she details in her memoir, Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups. During production of Chaplin's film City Lights in 1929-30, Hale was called in to replace Virginia Cherrill as the flower girl. Seven minutes of test footage survives from this recasting, and is included on the 2003 DVD release of the film, but economics forced Chaplin to rehire Cherrill. In discussing the situation in Unknown Chaplin, Hale states that her relationship with Chaplin was as strong as ever during filming.

Louise Brooks
A specialty dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies, Louise Brooks, met Chaplin when he came to New York for the opening there of The Gold Rush. For two months in the summer of 1925, they cavorted together at the Ritz, and with film financier A.C. Blumenthal and Follies dancer Peggy Fears in Blumenthal's penthouse suite at the Ambassador Hotel. Brooks was with Chaplin when he spent four hours watching a musician torture a violin in a Lower East Side restaurant, an act he would recreate in Limelight.

May Reeves
May Reeves was originally hired to be Chaplin's secretary on his 1931-1932 extended trip to Europe, dealing mostly with reading his personal correspondence. She worked only one morning, and then was introduced to Chaplin, who was instantly infatuated by her. May became his constant companion and lover on the trip, much to the disgust of Chaplin's brother, Syd. After Reeves also became involved with Syd, Chaplin ended the relationship and she left his entourage. Reeves chronicled her short time with Chaplin in her book, "The Intimate Charlie Chaplin".

Paulette Juliet Goddard

Chaplin and Paulette Goddard in The Great Dictator (1940)
Chaplin and actress Paulette Goddard were involved in a romantic and professional relationship between 1932 and 1940, with Goddard living with Chaplin in his Beverly Hills home for most of this time.
Chaplin "discovered" Goddard and gave her starring roles in Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Refusal to clarify their marital status is often claimed to have eliminated Goddard from final consideration for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. After the relationship ended in 1940, Chaplin and Goddard made public statements that they had been secretly married in 1936; but these claims were likely a mutual effort to prevent any lasting damage to Goddard's career. In any case, their relationship ended amicably in 1942, with Goddard being granted a settlement. Goddard went on to a major career in films at Paramount in the 1940s, working several times with Cecil B. DeMille. Like Chaplin, she lived her later life in Switzerland, dying in 1990.

Joan Barry
Chaplin had a brief affair with Joan Barry (1920-1996) in 1942, whom he was considering for a starring role in a proposed film, but the relationship ended when she began harassing him and displaying signs of severe mental illness (not unlike his mother). Chaplin's brief involvement with Berry proved to be a nightmare for him. After having a child, she filed a paternity suit against him in 1943. Although blood tests proved Chaplin was not the father of Barry's child, Barry's attorney, Joseph Scott, convinced the court that the tests were inadmissible as evidence, and Chaplin was ordered to support the child. The injustice of the ruling later led to a change in California law to allow blood tests as evidence. Federal prosecutors also brought Mann Act charges against Chaplin related to Barry in 1944, of which he was acquitted.[17] Chaplin's public image in America was gravely damaged by these sensational trials.[10] Barry was institutionalized in 1953 after she was found walking the streets barefoot, carrying a pair of baby sandals and a child's ring, and murmuring: "This is magic".[18]

Oona O'Neill
During Chaplin's legal trouble over the Berry affair, he met Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eugene O'Neill, and married her on 16 June 1943. He was fifty-four; she had just turned eighteen. The elder O'Neill refused all contact with Oona after the marriage, up until his death in 1953. The marriage was a long and happy one, with eight children. They had three sons: Christopher, Eugene and Michael Chaplin and five daughters: Geraldine, Josephine, Jane, Victoria and Annette-Emilie Chaplin. Oona survived Chaplin by fourteen years, but her final years were unhappy, with grief over Chaplin's death eventually leading to alcoholism. She died from pancreatic cancer in 1991.

Knighthood
Chaplin was named in the New Year's Honours List in 1975.[19] On 4 March, he was knighted at age eighty-five as a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II. The honour was first proposed in 1931, and again in 1956, when it was vetoed by the then Conservative government for fears of damage to relations with the United States at the height of the Cold War and planned invasion of Suez of that year.

Death
Chaplin's robust health began to slowly fail in the late 1960s, after the completion of his final film A Countess from Hong Kong, and more rapidly after he received his Academy Award in 1972. By 1977 he could no longer communicate and was confined to a wheelchair. He died in his sleep in Vevey, Switzerland.[20] He was interred in Corsier-Sur-Vevey Cemetery, Vaud, Switzerland. On 1 March 1978, his corpse was stolen by a small group of Polish mechanics in an attempt to extort money from his family.[21] The plot failed, the robbers were captured, and the corpse was recovered eleven weeks later near Lake Geneva. His body was reburied under two meters of concrete to prevent further attempts.

Other controversies
During World War I, Chaplin was criticised in the British press for not joining the Army. He had in fact presented himself for service, but was denied for being too small and underweight. Chaplin raised substantial funds for the war effort during War bond drives not only with public speaking at rallies but also by making, at his own expense, The Bond, a comedic propaganda film used in 1918. The lingering controversy reportedly is thought to have prevented Chaplin from receiving a knighthood in the 1930s.
For Chaplin's entire career, some level of controversy existed over claims of Jewish ancestry. Nazi propaganda in the 1930s prominently portrayed him as Jewish (named Karl Tonstein) relying on articles published in the U.S. press before,[22] and FBI investigations of Chaplin in the late 1940s also focused on Chaplin's ethnic origins. There is no documentary evidence of Jewish ancestry for Chaplin himself. For his entire public life, he fiercely refused to challenge or refute claims that he was Jewish, saying that to do so would always "play directly into the hands of anti-semites." Although baptised in the Church of England, Chaplin was thought to be an agnostic for most of his life.[23]
Chaplin has also figured in the mysterious events surrounding the death of producer Thomas Ince aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst in 1924, one of Hollywood's greatest mysteries. A fictionalized version of these events is depicted in Peter Bogdanovich's 2001 film The Cat's Meow. The precise circumstances of Ince's death will likely never be known.
Chaplin's lifelong attraction to younger women remains another enduring source of interest to some. His biographers have attributed this to a teenage infatuation with Hetty Kelly, whom he met in Britain while performing in the music hall, and which possibly defined his feminine ideal. Chaplin clearly relished the role of discovering and closely guiding young female stars; with the exception of Mildred Harris, all of his marriages and most of his major relationships began in this manner.

Legacy
A minor planet, 3623 Chaplin, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1981, is named after Chaplin.[24]
There is a statue of Chaplin in front of Colosseum Theatre in Oslo.
In 1915, Chaplin joined the Los Angeles Athletic Club, and lived there periodically until 1922. A mural of him in his "Tramp" costume adorns one large panel on the north wall of the seventh floor, alongside the running track.
There is a statue of Chaplin in front of the alimentarium in Vevey to commemorate the last part of his life, and a replica also stands in Leicester Square in London.
Among his many honours, Chaplin has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (Chaplin's star was not dedicated until the 1970s, due to controversies over his politics in the 1950s and 1960s). In 1985 he was honoured with his image on a postage stamp of the United Kingdom, and in 1994 he appeared on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. He has also a bronze statue in Waterville, County Kerry in Ireland, to show Irish appreciation for his love of the country.
From 1917 to 1918, silent film actor Billy West made more than 20 films as a comedian precisely imitating Chaplin's tramp character, makeup and costume.[25]
Chaplin has a waxwork in Madame Tussauds.
Fernand Léger's film Ballet Mécanique opens with an animated image of Chaplin which is broken apart like a puzzle. The puzzle-like Chaplin image returns at the end of the film.
In Zéro de conduite, Jean Daste with cane and derby, imitates Chaplin for the boys' entertainment.
In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson put on a show for William Holden dressed up as the "Tramp."
Italian films, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini's La ricotta, Ermanno Olmi's Il posto, Sergio Leone's Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and especially Federico Fellini's La strada, 8½ and I clowns, pay heartfelt homage to Chaplin's works.
In 1992, a film was made about Chaplin's life entitled Chaplin, directed by Oscar-winner Richard Attenborough, and starring Robert Downey Jr., Dan Aykroyd, and Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie's daughter, portraying Charlie's mother, her own grandmother), for which Downey was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1993.
In 2001, British comedian Eddie Izzard played Chaplin in the film, The Cat's Meow, which speculated about the still-unsolved death of producer Thomas Ince aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, on which Chaplin was a guest.
Chaplin's Tramp character was portrayed by, amongst others, musician and artist Steve Fairnie in a famous 1980s advertising campaign for the IBM PC personal computer and later IBM PCjr.
In Spanish, charlotada means a show of comedy in bullfighting, and a ridiculous or grotesque public performance. It is named after the comedic bullfighter Carmelo Tusquellas, nicknamed Charlot because his attire and style are reminiscent of Chaplin (also named Charlot in Spanish markets).
Sridevi dressed and acted as Chaplin in a scene for the Hindi Film Mr. India.
Raj Kapoor modeled his character on Chaplin in Hindi films like Shri 420 and Mera Naam Joker
Chiranjeevi, a Telugu actor imitated Chaplin in his movie "Chantabbai".
Kamal Haasan, another Indian actor moulded his character "Chaplin Chellappa" in the tamil film Punnagai Mannan
In an episode of Class of 3000, one of the main characters, Lil' D, dresses up as Chaplin (extending his moustache) for a costume party. One of the girls says to him, "Go away, you little tramp!"
Chaplin was left-handed. In one book of left-handed lore, he is shown playing a violin left-handed. He rebuilt a violin to make left-handed playing easier; this would require disassembling it, moving inside parts around, and reboring the holes in the neck for the tuning pegs to allow him to restring the instrument.[citation needed]
Spencer Dryden, the drummer for Jefferson Airplane from 1967-1970, was the son of Chaplin's half-brother Wheeler Dryden, thus making him Charlie Chaplin's nephew. Reportedly he kept this fact from most people, including even his band mates, in order to avoid unwelcome attention.In Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange Alex refers to the prison pastor as "Charlie", a play on the homophone "Chaplain" in a form of Cockney rhyming slang.[citation needed]
In an episode of Blackadder he is frequently referenced as Baldrick attempts to bolster war-time optimism with Chaplin routines.
Šarlo Akrobata (translated version of Charlie Chaplin), a famous and influental Serbian and former Yugoslav new wave band, got the name by Charlie Chaplin.

Comparison with other silent comics
Since the 1960s, Chaplin's films have been unendingly compared to those of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (the other two great silent film comedians alongside Charlie Chaplin), especially among the loyal fans of each comic.
The three had very different styles: Chaplin had a strong affinity for sentimentality and pathos (which was popular in the 1920s), Lloyd was renowned for his everyman persona and classic 1920s optimism, and Keaton adhered to onscreen stoicism with a cynical tone more suited to modern audiences. On a historical level, Chaplin was behind the pioneering generation of film comedians, and both the younger Keaton and Harold Lloyd built upon his groundwork (in fact, Lloyd's early characters "Willie Work" and "Lonesome Luke" were obvious Chaplin ripoffs, something that Lloyd acknowledged and tried hard to move away from - eventually succeeding). Chaplin's period of film experimentation ended after the Mutual period (1916-1917), just before Keaton entered films.
Commercially, Chaplin made some of the highest-grossing films in the silent era; The Gold Rush is the fifth with US$4.25 million and The Circus is the seventh with US$3.8 million. However, Chaplin's films combined made about US$10.5 million while Harold Lloyd's grossed US$15.7 million (Lloyd was far more prolific, releasing twelve feature films in the 1920s while Chaplin released just three). Buster Keaton's films were not nearly as commercially successful as Chaplin's or Lloyd's even at the height of his popularity, and only received belated critical acclaim in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Beyond a healthy professional rivalry, former vaudevillians Chaplin and Keaton thought highly of one another. Keaton stated in his autobiography that Chaplin was the greatest comedian that ever lived, and the greatest comedy director. Chaplin also greatly admired Keaton: he welcomed him to United Artists in 1925, advised him against his disastrous move to MGM in 1928, and for his last American film, Limelight, wrote a part specifically for Keaton as his first on-screen comedy partner since 1915.
Chaplin was an admirer of his predecessor, the French silent movie comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films.

Walt Disney
Born
Walter Elias DisneyDecember 5, 1901(1901-12-05)[1]Chicago, Illinois
Died
December 15, 1966 (aged 65)Burbank, California
Occupation
Film producer, Co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, formerly known as Walt Disney Productions
Spouse(s)
Lillian Bounds (1925-1997)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award1932 For the creation of Mickey Mouse1938 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs1941 FantasiaBest Short Subject, Cartoon1932 Flowers and Trees1934 Three Little Pigs1935 The Tortoise and the Hare1936 Three Orphan Kittens1937 The Country Cousin1938 The Old Mill1939 Ferdinand the Bull1940 Ugly Duckling1942 Lend a Paw1943 Der Fuehrer's Face1954 Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom
Best Short Subject, Two-reel1949 Seal Island1951 Beaver Valley1952 Nature's Half Acre1953 Water Birds1954 Bear Country1969 Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery DayIrving G. Thalberg Memorial Award1942 Lifetime AchievementBest Documentary, Short Subjects1954 The Alaskan Eskimo1956 Men Against the ArcticBest Documentary, Features1954 The Living Desert1955 The Vanishing PrairieBest Short Subject, Live Action Subjects1959 Grand Canyon
Emmy Awards
Best Producer - Film Series1956 Disneyland
Golden Globe Awards
Special Award1948 Bambi1954 The Living DesertCecil B. DeMille Award1953 Lifetime Achievement
Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was a multiple Academy Award-winning American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Disney is famous for his influence in the field of entertainment during the twentieth century. As the co-founder (with his brother Roy O. Disney) of Walt Disney Productions, Disney became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation he co-founded, now known as The Walt Disney Company, today has annual revenues of approximately U.S. $35 billion.
Disney is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created a number of the world's most famous fictional characters, including the one many consider Disney's alter ego, Mickey Mouse.[citation needed] He received fifty-nine Academy Award nominations and won twenty-six Oscars, including a record four in one year[2], and thus holds the record for the individual with the most awards and the most nominations. He also won seven Emmy Awards. He is the namesake for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the United States, Japan, France, and China.
Disney died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966, a few years prior to the opening of his Walt Disney World Resort dream project in Florida.
1901–1937: The beginnings

Childhood
Walt Disney was born to Elias Disney an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, who was of German-American descent.[3] Walt Disney's ancestors had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny in Ireland. Arundel Elias Disney, great-grandfather of Walt Disney was born in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1801 and was a descendant of Hughes and his son Robert d'Isigny (France) who settled in England with William the Conquereor in 1066.[4]
His father Elias Disney moved from Huron County, Ontario to the United States in 1878, seeking first for gold in California but finally farming with his parents near Ellis, Kansas until 1884. He worked for Union Pacific Railroad and married Flora Call on January 1, 1888 in Acron, Florida. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1890,[5] where his brother Robert lived.[5] For most of his early life, Robert helped Elias financially.[5] In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri,[6] where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland.[6] While in Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing.[7] One of their neighbours, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, paid him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse, Rupert.[7] He also developed his love for trains in Marceline, which owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran through town. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming train.[3] Then he would look for his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, running the train.
The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years,[8] before moving to Kansas City in 1911.[9] There, Walt and his sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar School where he met Walter Pfeiffer. The Pfeiffers were theatre aficionados, and introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Soon, Walt was spending more time at the Pfeiffers' than at home.[10]

Teenage years

Disney as an ambulance driver during World War I.
In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back there.[11] In the fall, Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and began taking night courses at the Chicago Art Institute.[12] Disney became the cartoonist for the school newspaper. His cartoons were very patriotic, focusing on World War I. Disney dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to join the Army, but the army rejected him because he was underage.[13]
After his rejection from the army, Walt and one of his friends decided to join the Red Cross.[14] Soon after he joined The Red Cross, Walt was sent to France for a year, where he drove an ambulance.[15]
In 1919, Walt, hoping to find work outside the Chicago Ozell factory,[16] left home and moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career.[17] His brother Roy worked at a bank in the area and got a job for him, through a friend, at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio.[17] At Pesmen-Rubin, Disney created ads for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters.[18] It was here that he met a cartoonist named Ubbe Iwerks.[19] Both of them became close friends and decided to start their own art business.[20]
In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks formed a company called, "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". However, following a rough start, Iwerks left temporarily to earn money at Kansas City Film Ad Company. Disney would soon join Iwerks at the Kansas City Film Ad Company.[21] While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Disney took up an interest in the field of animation, and decided to become an animator.[22] Walt then decided to open his own animation business,[23] and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Fred Harman, as his first employee.[23] 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-[24] to air their cartoons — which they titled "Laugh-O-Grams" — at his local theater.[24]

Laugh O'Gram Studio
Presented as "Newman Laugh-O Grams,"[24] Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area.[25] Through the success of Laugh-O Grams, Disney was able to acquire his own studio[26] and hire a vast number of additional animators, including Fred Harman's brother Hugh Harman, Rudolph Isling, and his close friend Ubbe Iwerks.[27] Unfortunately, with all his high employee salaries unable to make up for studio profits, Walt was unable to successfully manage money[28] and as a result, the studio would become loaded with debt.[28] The studio would eventually wind up bankrupt;[29] Disney then set his sights on establishing a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California[30]

Hollywood
Disney and his brother pooled their money to set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood.[31] Needing to find a distributor for his new Alice Comedies-which he started making while in Kansas Citybut never got to distribute- Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who promptly wrote back to him. She was keen on a distribution deal with Disney for more live-action/animated shorts based upon Alice's Wonderland.[32]

Alice Comedies

A theatrical poster for the Alice Comedies short Alice in the Jungle (1925).
Virginia Davis (the live-action star of Alice’s Wonderland) and her family were relocated at Disney's request from Kansas City to Hollywood, as were Iwerks and his family. This was the beginning of the Disney Brothers' Studio. It was located on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district, where the studio would remain until 1939. In 1925, Disney hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. After a brief period of dating her, the two got married the same year.
The new series, Alice Comedies, was reasonably successful, and featured both Dawn O'Day and Margie Gay as Alice. Lois Hardwick also briefly assumed the role of Alice. By the time the series ended in 1927, the focus was more on the animated characters, in particular a cat named Julius who resembled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
By 1927, Charles B. Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business, and 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 hired back Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng from Kansas City.
In February 1928, Disney went to New York to negotiate a higher fee per short from Mintz. Disney was shocked when Mintz announced that not only he wanted 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 (notably excepting Iwerks) 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 Disney. Disney declined Mintz's offer and lost most of his animation staff.
With most of his staff gone Disney now found himself on his own again.[33] It took Disney's company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character. The Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal in 2006, through a trade for longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels.

Mickey Mouse
Main article: Mickey Mouse
After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a new character to replace him. He based the character on a mouse he had adopted as a pet while working in a Kansas City studio.[34] Ub Iwerks reworked on the sketches made by Disney so that it was easier to animate it. However, Mickey's voice and personality was provided by Disney. As many of the old animators have commented, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul."[34] Besides Oswald and Mickey, a similar mouse-character is seen in Alice Comedies which featured a mouse named Ike the Mouse, and the first Flip the Frog cartoon called Fiddlesticks, which showed a Mickey Mouse-look alike playing fiddle. The initial films were animated by Iwerks, his name was prominently featured on the title cards. The mouse was originally named "Mortimer", but later christened "Mickey Mouse" by Lillian Disney who thought that the name Mortimer did not fit. Mortimer later became the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie, who was taller than his renowned adversary and had a Brooklyn accent.
The first animated short with Mickey in it was titled, Plane Crazy, which was, like all of Disney's previous works, a silent film. After failing to find a distributor for Plane Crazy or 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,[35] and Plane Crazy, The Galloping Gaucho, and all future Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. Disney himself provided the vocal effects for the earliest cartoons and performed as the voice of Mickey Mouse until 1946. After the release of Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney would continue to successfully use sound in all of his future cartoons, and Cinephone became the new distributor for Disney's early sound cartoons as well.[36] Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character.[34] By 1930, Felix, now in sound, had faded from the screen, as his sound cartoons failed to gain attention.[37] Mickey's popularity would now skyrocket in the early 1930s
Silly Symphonies

Walt Disney's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Following the footsteps of Mickey Mouse series, a series of musical shorts titled, Silly Symphonies was released in 1929. The first of these was titled The Skeleton Dance and 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 was not seeing its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers,[38] and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons were musical novelty, and Carl Stalling wrote the score for the first Silly Symphony cartoons as well
Iwerks was soon lured by Powers into opening his own studio with an exclusive contract. Later, Carl Stalling would also leave Disney to join Iwerks' new studio.[40] Iwerks launched his Flip the Frog series with first voice cartoon in color, "Fiddlesticks," filmed in two-strip Technicolor. Iwerks also created two other series of cartoons, the Willie Whopper and the Comicolor. In 1936, Iwerks shut his studio to work on various projects dealing with animation technology. He would return to Disney in 1940 and, would go on to pioneer a number of film processes and specialized animation technologies in the studio's research and development department.
By 1932, Mickey Mouse had become quite a popular cinema character, but Silly Symphonies was not as successful. The same year also saw competition for Disney grow worse as Max Fleischer's flapper cartoon character, Betty Boop would gain more popularity among theater audiences.[41] Fleischer was considered to be Disney's main rival in the 1930s,[42] and 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 and was replaced by United Artists.[43] In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera,[44] approached Walt and convinced him to redo Flowers and Trees, which was originally done in black and white, with three-strip Technicolor.[45] Flowers and Trees would go on to be a phenomenal success and would also win the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons for 1932. After Flowers and Trees was released, all future Silly Symphony cartoons were done in color as well. Disney was also able to negotiate a two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use three-strip Technicolor,[46][47] which would also eventually be extended to five years as well.[39] Through Silly Symphonies, Disney would also create his most successful cartoon short of all time, The Three Little Pigs, in 1933.[48] The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, and also featured the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf
First Academy Award
In 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of "Mickey Mouse", whose series was made into color in 1935 and soon launched spin-off series for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto; Pluto and Donald would immediately get their individual cartoons in 1937,[50] and Goofy would get solo cartoons in 1939 as well.[51] Of all of Mickey's partners, Donald Duck–who first teamed with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon, Orphan's Benefit–was arguably the most popular, and went on to become Disney's second most successful cartoon character of all time
Children
Disney's first attempt at pregnancy ended up in Lilly having a miscarriage. When Lilly Disney became pregnant again, she gave birth to a daughter, Diane Marie Disney, on December 18, 1933. A few years later, the Disneys adopted Sharon Mae Disney, (born December 21, 1934) as their second child.

1937–1941: The Golden Age of Animation

"Disney's Folly": Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
After the creation of two cartoon series, Disney soon began plans for a full-length feature in 1934. In 1935, opinion polls showed that another cartoon series, Popeye the Sailor, produced by Max Fleischer, was more popular than Mickey Mouse.[53] Disney was, however, able to put Mickey back on top, and also increase Mickey's popularity further by colorizing him and partially redesigning him into what was considered to be his most appealing design up to this point in time.[34] When the film industry came to know about Disney's plans to produce an animated feature-length version of Snow White, they dubbed the project as "Disney's Folly" and were certain that the project would destroy the Disney studio. Both Lillian and Roy tried to talk Disney out of the project, but he continued plans for the feature. He employed Chouinard Art Institute professor Don Graham to start a training operation for the studio staff, and 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; Disney would first use this new technique in the 1937 Silly Symphonies short The Old Mill.[54]
All of this development and training was used to elevate the quality of the studio so that it would be able to give the feature film the quality Disney desired. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as the feature was named, was in full production from 1934 until mid-1937, when the studio ran out of money. To acquire the funding to complete Snow White, Disney had to show a rough cut of the motion picture to loan officers at the Bank of America, who gave the studio the money to finish the picture. The finished film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater on December 21, 1937; at the conclusion of the film, the audience gave Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a standing ovation. Snow White, the first animated feature in English and Technicolor, was released in February 1938 under a new distribution deal with RKO Radio Pictures; RKO had previously been the distributor for Disney cartoons in 1936, after it closed down the Van Beuren Studios in exchange for distribution.[55] The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over $8 million in its original theatrical release. The success of Snow White, (for which Disney received one full-size, and seven miniature Oscar statuettes) allowed Disney 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 it also ushered into what was known as the Golden Age of Animation for Disney.[56][57] The feature animation staff, having just completed Pinocchio, continued work on Fantasia and Bambi, while the shorts staff continued work on the Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto cartoon series, ending the Silly Symphonies at this time. Animator Fred Moore had redesigned Mickey Mouse in the late 1930s, when Donald Duck began to gain more popularity among theater audiences than Mickey Mouse
During World War II
Pinocchio and Fantasia followed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs into the movie theaters in 1940, but both were financial disappointments. The inexpensive Dumbo was planned as an income generator, but during production of the new film, most of the animation staff went on strike, permanently straining the relationship between Disney and his artists.
Shortly after the release of Dumbo in October 1941, the United States entered World War II. The U.S. Army contracted most of the Disney studio's facilities and had the staff create training and instructional films for the military, home-front morale-boosting shorts such as Der Fuehrer's Face and the feature film Victory Through Air Power in 1943. However, the military films did not generate income, and the feature film Bambi underperformed when it was released in April 1942. Disney successfully re-issued Snow White in 1944, establishing a 7-year re-release tradition for Disney features.
The Disney studios also created inexpensive package films, containing collections of cartoon shorts, and issued them to theaters during this period. The most notable and successful of these were Saludos Amigos (1942), its sequel The Three Caballeros (1945), 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 Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, and the second based on The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. 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 as well .By the late 1940s, the studio had recovered enough to continue production on the full-length features, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, which had been shelved during the war years, and began work on Cinderella, which became Disney's most successful film since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The studio also began a series of live-action nature films, titled True-Life Adventures, in 1948 with On Seal Island. Despite rebounding success through feature films, Disney's animation shorts were no longer as popular as they used to be, and people began to instead draw attention to Warner Bros and their animation star Bugs Bunny; by 1942, Warner Bros' Termite Terrace officially became the most popular animation studio.[60] However, while Bugs Bunny's popularity rose in the 1940s, so did Donald Duck's;[61] Donald would also replace Mickey Mouse as Disney's star character in 1949.[62]

Testimony before Congress
In 1947, during the early years of the Cold War,[63] Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators and labor union organizers, as Communist agitators. All three men denied the allegations. Archives of the Soviet Union released by the Russian government implicate Sorrell as a Communist spy. [64] Disney implicated the Screen Actors Guild as a Communist front, and charged that the 1941 strike was part of an organized Communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood. However, no evidence has been discovered to support this
1955–1966: Theme parks and beyond

Carolwood Pacific Railroad

The Lilly Belle on display at Disneyland Main Station in 1993. The caboose's woodwork was done entirely by Walt himself.
Main article: Carolwood Pacific Railroad
During 1949, Disney and his family moved to a new home on a large piece of property in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, California. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, owners of 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, originated from the address of his home that was located on Carolwood Drive. The railroad's half-mile long layout included a 46-foot (14 m)-long trestle, loops, overpasses, gradients, an elevated berm, and a 90-foot (27 m) tunnel underneath Mrs. Disney's flowerbed. He named the miniature working steam locomotive built by Roger E. Broggie of the Disney Studios Lilly Belle in his wife's honor. He 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.

Planning Disneyland
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. He got his idea for a children's theme park after visiting Children's Fairyland in Oakland, California. This plan was originally meant for a plot located south of the Studio, across the street. The original ideas developed into a concept for a larger enterprise that was to become Disneyland. Disney spent five years of his life developing Disneyland and created a new subsidiary of his company, called WED Enterprises, to carry out the 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.
When describing one of his earliest plans to Herb Ryman (who created the first aerial drawing of Disneyland which was presented to the Bank of America while requesting for funds), Disney said, "Herbie, I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train."[65] 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.

Expanding into new areas
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, and was soon followed by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (in CinemaScope, 1954), The Shaggy Dog (1959), and The Parent Trap (1961). The Walt Disney Studio produced its first TV special, One Hour in Wonderland, in 1950. Disney began hosting a weekly anthology series on ABC named Disneyland after the park, where he showed clips of past Disney productions, gave tours of his studio, and familiarized the public with Disneyland as it was being constructed in Anaheim, California. The show also featured a Davy Crockett miniseries, which started a craze among the American youth known as the Davy Crockett craze, in which millions of coonskin caps and other Crockett memorabilia were sold across the country.[66] In 1955, the studio's first daily television show, Mickey Mouse Club debuted, which would continue in many various incarnations into the 1990s.

Walt Disney meets with Wernher von Braun.
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. During Disney's lifetime, the animation department created the successful Lady and the Tramp (in CinemaScope, 1955), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Sleeping Beauty (in Super Technirama 70mm, 1959) and The Sword in the Stone (1963).
Production on the short cartoons had kept pace until 1956, when Disney shut down the shorts division. Special shorts projects would continue to be made for the rest of the studio's duration on an irregular basis. These productions were all distributed by Disney's new subsidiary, Buena Vista Distribution, which had assumed 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 upon a number of successful Disney properties and films. After 1955, the show, Disneyland came to be known as Walt Disney Presents. The show transformed from black-and-white to color in 1961 and changed its name to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, moving from ABC to NBC,[67] and eventually evolving into its current form as The Wonderful World of Disney. It continued to air on NBC until 1981, when CBS picked it up .Since then, it has aired on ABC, NBC, Hallmark Channel and Cartoon Network via separate broadcast rights deals.
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.

Early 1960s successes

(Left to right) Robert B. Sherman, Richard M. Sherman and Walt Disney sing "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" (1964)
By the early 1960s, the Disney empire was 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 pursuing, Disney finally procured 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.

The statue "Partners" located on Main Street, U.S.A. in Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Florida.

Plans for Disney World and EPCOT
Disney World was to include a larger, more elaborate version of Disneyland which was to be called the Magic Kingdom. 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, or EPCOT for short.

Death

Walt Disney's grave site.
Disney's involvement in Disney World ended in late 1966; after many years of chain smoking cigarettes, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was admitted to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center across the street from the Disney Studio, where his health began to deteriorate, causing him to suffer cardiac arrest. Just before he was hospitalized, Disney was scheduled to undergo a neck surgery for an old polo injury;[69] Disney was a frequent polo player at The Riveria Club in Hollywood, California for many years.[70] On November 2, 1966, during pre-surgery X-rays, doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital in Los Angeles discovered that Disney had an enormous tumor on his left lung.[71] Five days later, Disney went back to hospital for surgery, but the tumor had spread to such great extent that doctors had to remove his entire left lung.[71] The doctors then told Disney that he only had six months to a year to live.[71] After several chemotherapy sessions, Disney and his wife spent a short amount of time in Palm Springs, California before returning home.[69] On November 30, 1966, Disney collapsed in his home, but was revived by paramedics, and was taken back to the hospital, where he died[69] on December 15, 1966 at 9:30 a.m., ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday. He was cremated on December 17, 1966 and his ashes reside at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Roy O. Disney continued to carry out the Florida project, insisting that the name be changed to Walt Disney World in honor of his brother.
Songwriter Robert B. Sherman said about the last time he saw Disney:

He was up in the third floor of the animation building after a run-through of The Happiest Millionaire. He usually held court in the hallway afterward for the people involved with the picture. And he started talking to them, telling them what he liked and what they should change, and then, when they were through, he turned to us and with a big smile, he said, 'Keep up the good work, boys.' And he walked to his office. It was the last we ever saw of him.[72]
”
A long-standing urban legend maintains that Disney was cryonically frozen, and his frozen corpse was stored underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.[73] However, this was discredited due to the fact that Disney was cremated, and the first known instance of Cryonic Freezing of a corpse (of Dr. James Bedford) occurred a month later in January.[73]
The final productions in which Disney had an active role were the animated feature, The Jungle Book and the live-action musical comedy The Happiest Millionaire, both released in 1967.

1967–present: Legacy

Continuing the vision

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 that year, their families 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, he then 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.[74] 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 Walt's vision 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 but the company later changed this policy.

The Disney entertainment empire
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. The Walt Disney Company today owns, among other assets, 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 has an annual revenue of over U.S. $35 billion.[75]

Disney Animation today
Traditional hand-drawn animation, with which Walt Disney started his company, no longer continues at the Walt Disney Feature Animation studio. After a stream of financially unsuccessful traditionally-animated features in the early 2000s, the two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank was converted to a computer animation production facility. 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, and the upcoming 2009 film The Princess and the Frog will mark Disney's return to traditional cel animation.

CalArts
In his later years, Disney devoted substantial time towards funding The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). It was 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 towards CalArts, which helped in building its campus. In his will, Disney paved the way for creation of several charitable trusts which included one for the California Institute of the Arts and other for the Disney Foundation.[76] He also donated 38 acres (Template:Convert/sqmi km²) of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for the school to be built on. CalArts moved onto the Valencia campus in 1971.
In an early admissions bulletin, Disney explained:
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.”

Academy Awards
Walt Disney holds the records for number of Academy Award nominations (with fifty-nine) and number of awarded Oscars (twenty-six, below). Four of his Oscars were special awards, and one, his last, was granted posthumously.
1932: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Flowers and Trees (1932)
1932: Honorary Award for: creation of Mickey Mouse.
1934: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Little Pigs (1933)
1935: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Tortoise and the Hare (1934)
1936: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Orphan Kittens (1935)
1937: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Country Cousin (1936)
1938: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Old Mill (1937)
1939: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ferdinand the Bull (1938)
1938: Honorary Award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) 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 was one statuette and seven miniature statuettes)[2]
1940: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ugly Duckling(1939)
1941: Honorary Award for: Fantasia (1941), 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"
1942: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Lend a Paw (1941)
1943: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)
1949: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Seal Island (1948)
1949: Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
1951: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Beaver Valley (1950)
1952: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Nature's Half Acre (1951)
1953: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Water Birds (1952)
1954: Best Documentary, Features for: The Living Desert (1953)
1954: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: The Alaskan Eskimo (1953)
1954: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953)
1954: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Bear Country (1953)
1955: Best Documentary, Features for: The Vanishing Prairie (1954)
1956: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: Men Against the Arctic
1959: Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects for: Grand Canyon
1969: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

Paul Newman

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This article is about the American actor and race team owner. For the Derbyshire cricketer, see Paul Newman (cricketer).
Paul Newman
in 2007
Born
Paul Leonard NewmanJanuary 26, 1925(1925-01-26)Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Died
September 26, 2008 (aged 83)Westport, Connecticut, USA
Years active
1952 - 2008
Spouse(s)
Jackie Witte (1949–1958) (divorced)Joanne Woodward (1958–2008) (his death)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award1985 Lifetime AchievementBest Actor1986 The Color of MoneyJean Hersholt Humanitarian Award1994 Outstanding Contributions to Humanitarian Causes
BAFTA Awards
Best Actor in a Leading Role1961 The Hustler
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Supporting Actor - Miniseries or a Movie2005 Empire Falls
Golden Globe Awards
Most Promising Newcomer - Male1956 Somebody Up There Likes Me ; The RackBest Director - Motion Picture1968 Rachel, RachelCecil B. DeMille Award1984 Lifetime AchievementBest Supporting Actor - Series, Miniseries or TV Movie2005 Empire Falls
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Life Achievement Award1986 Lifetime AchievementOutstanding Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie2005 Empire Falls
Other awards
Best Actor Award (Cannes Film Festival)1958 The Long, Hot SummerNBR Award for Best Actor1986 The Color of MoneyNSFC Award for Best Actor1994 Nobody's FoolNYFCC Award for Best Director1968 Rachel, RachelNYFCC Award for Best Actor1994 Nobody's FoolPFCS Award for Best Supporting Actor2002 Road to PerditionSilver Bear for Best Actor1994 Nobody's FoolHollywood Walk of Fame - Motion Picture7060 Hollywood Blvd
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)[1][2][3] was an Academy Award–winning and seven-time Academy Award–nominated American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian and auto racing enthusiast. He won numerous awards, including an Academy Award for his performance in the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money, three Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy award, and many honorary awards. He also won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open wheel IndyCar racing.
Newman was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which Newman donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity.[4] As of October 2008, these donations had exceeded US $250 million.[4]
On September 26, 2008, Newman died at his longtime home in Westport, Connecticut, of complications arising from lung cancerEarly life
Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland), the son of Theresa (née Fetzer or Fetsko; Slovak: Terézia Fecková)[8][9] and Arthur Samuel Newman, who ran a profitable sporting goods store.[10][11] His father was Jewish and his mother, who practiced Christian Science, was born to a Slovak Catholic family at Ptičie (formerly Peticse) in the former Austria–Hungary (now in Slovakia).[12][13][9] Newman had described himself as Jewish, stating that, "it's more of a challenge".[14] Newman's mother worked in his father's store, while raising Paul and his brother Arthur (who later became a producer and production manager).[15]
Newman showed an early interest in the theater, which his mother encouraged. At the age of seven, he made his acting debut, playing the court jester in a school production of Robin Hood. Graduating from Shaker Heights High School in 1943, he briefly attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity.[15]

Military service
Newman served in the Navy in World War II in the Pacific theater.[15] Newman was sent to the Navy V-12 program at Ohio University, hoping to be accepted for pilot training, but this failed when it was discovered he was color blind.[15][16] He was sent instead to boot camp and then on to further training as a radioman and gunner. Qualifying as a rear-seat radioman and gunner in torpedo bombers, in 1944 Aviation Radioman Third Class Newman was sent to Barber's Point, Hawaii, and was subsequently assigned to Pacific-based replacement torpedo squadrons (VT-98, VT-99, and VT-100). These torpedo squadrons were responsible primarily for training replacement pilots and combat air crewmen, placing particular importance on carrier landings.[16] He later flew from aircraft carriers as a tail gunner in the Avenger torpedo bomber. As a radioman/gunner, he served aboard the USS Bunker Hill during the battle for Okinawa in the spring of 1945. He was ordered to the ship with a draft of replacements shortly before the attack but, by a fluke of war, was held back because his pilot had an ear infection. The rest of his detail died.[17]
After the war, he completed his degree at Kenyon College, graduating in 1949.[15] Newman later studied Drama at Yale University, graduating in 1954, and under Lee Strasberg at the Actors' Studio in New York City.[15]
Oscar Levant wrote that Newman was initially hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood: "Too close to the cake," he reported him saying, "Also, no place to study."[18]

[edit] Film career
Newman made his Broadway theater debut in the original production of William Inge's Picnic with Kim Stanley. He later appeared in the original Broadway productions of The Desperate Hours and Sweet Bird of Youth with Geraldine Page. He would later star in the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth, which also starred Page.
His first movie was The Silver Chalice (1954), followed by acclaimed roles in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), as boxer Rocky Graziano; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor; and The Young Philadelphians (1959), with Barbara Rush and Robert Vaughn.
Newman appeared in a screen test with James Dean for East of Eden (1955). Newman was testing for the role of Aron Trask; Dean was testing for the role of Aron's fraternal twin brother, Cal Trask. Dean won the part of Cal, while the role Newman was up for went to Richard Davalos. The same year Newman would co-star with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra in a live —and color —television broadcast of the Thornton Wilder stage play Our Town. In 2003 Newman would act in a remake of Our Town, taking on Sinatra's role as the stage manager.

Major films
Newman was one of the few actors who successfully made the transition from 1950s cinema to that of the 1960s and 1970s. His rebellious persona translated well to a subsequent generation. Newman starred in Exodus (1960), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Towering Inferno (1974), Slap Shot (1977) and The Verdict (1982). He teamed with fellow actor Robert Redford and director George Roy Hill for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).
He appeared with his wife, Joanne Woodward, in the feature films The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, (1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Winning (1969), WUSA (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975), Harry & Son (1984) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). They also both starred in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls, but did not have any scenes together.
In addition to starring in and directing Harry & Son, Newman also directed four feature films (in which he did not act) starring Woodward. They were Rachel, Rachel (1968), based on Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, the screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), the television screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Shadow Box (1980) and a screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1987).
Twenty-five years after The Hustler, Newman reprised his role of "Fast" Eddie Felson in the Martin Scorsese-directed The Color of Money (1986), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Last works
In 2003, he appeared in a Broadway theatre revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, receiving his first Tony Award nomination for his performance. PBS and the cable network Showtime aired a taping of the production, and Newman was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie.
His last screen appearance was as a conflicted mob boss in the 2002 film Road to Perdition opposite Tom Hanks, although he continued to provide voice work for films. In keeping with his strong interest in car racing, he provided the voice of Doc Hudson, a retired race car in Disney/Pixar's Cars. Similarly, he served as narrator for the 2007 film Dale, about the life of the legendary NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, which turned out to be Newman's final film performance in any form.

Retirement from acting
Newman announced that he would entirely retire from acting on May 25, 2007. He told US broadcaster ABC that he did not feel he could continue acting on the level that he would want to. "You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."[19][20]

Philanthropy
With writer A.E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman's Own, a line of food products, in 1982. The brand started with salad dressing, and has expanded to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine, among other things. Newman established a policy that all proceeds from the sale of Newman's Own products, after taxes, would be donated to charity. As of early 2006, the franchise has resulted in excess of $200 million in donations.[4] He co-wrote a memoir about the subject with Hotchner, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. Among other awards, Newman's Own co-sponsors the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 reward designed to recognize those who protect the First Amendment as it applies to the written word. His daughter, Nell Newman, took the helm of the company with his death.[21]
One beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children, which is located in Ashford, Connecticut. Newman cofounded the camp in 1988; it was named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Newman's college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted "Hole in the Wall" as their "national philanthropy" in 1995. One camp has expanded to become several Hole in the Wall Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France and Israel. The camp serves 13,000 children every year, free of charge.[4]
In June 1999 Newman donated $250,000 to Catholic Relief Services in aid refugees in KosovoOn June 1, 2007, Kenyon College announced that Newman had donated $10 million to the school to establish a scholarship fund as part of the college's current $230 million fund-raising campaign. Newman and Woodward were honorary co-chairs of a previous campaign.[23]
Paul Newman was one of the founders of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), a membership organization of CEOs and corporate chairpersons committed to raising the level and quality of global corporate philanthropy. Founded in 1999 by Newman and a few leading CEOs, CECP has grown to include more than 175 members and, through annual executive convenings, extensive benchmarking research, and best practice publications, leads the business community in developing sustainable and strategic community partnerships through philanthropy.[24]

Marriages and family
Newman was married twice. His first marriage to Jackie Witte[15] lasted from 1949 to 1958. Together they had a son, Scott (1950), and two daughters, Susan Kendall (1953) and Stephanie.[15] Scott Newman, who died in November 1978 from an accidental drug overdose,[25] appeared in the films Breakheart Pass, The Towering Inferno and the 1977 film Fraternity Row. Paul Newman started the Scott Newman Center for drug abuse prevention in memory of his son.[26] Susan is a documentary filmmaker and philanthropist and has Broadway and screen credits, including a starring role as one of four Beatles fans in 1978's I Wanna Hold Your Hand. She also received an Emmy nomination as co-producer of his telefilm, The Shadow Box. Newman had two grandsons.
Newman married actress Joanne Woodward on February 2, 1958.[27] They had three daughters: Elinor "Nell" Teresa (1959), Melissa "Lissy" Stewart (1961), and Claire "Clea" Olivia (1965). Newman directed Elinor (stage name Nell Potts) in the central role alongside her mother in the film The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

Newman at a political rally for Eugene McCarthy in 1968.
Newman lived away from the Hollywood environment. He made his home quietly in Westport, Connecticut, and was devoted to his wife and family. When asked about infidelity, he quipped, "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?"[28][29][30]

Political activism
For his strong support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (and effective use of television commercials in California), Newman was 19th on Richard Nixon's enemies list.[31]
Consistent with his work for liberal causes, Newman publicly supported Ned Lamont's candidacy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary against Senator Joe Lieberman, and was even rumored as a candidate himself until Lamont emerged as a credible alternative. He had donated to Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.[32]
Newman was also a vocal supporter of gay rights and, in particular, same-sex marriage.[33]

Auto racing
Newman was an avid auto racing enthusiast, and first became interested in motorsports ("the first thing that I ever found I had any grace in") while training for and filming Winning, a 1969 film. Newman's first professional event was in 1972, in Thompson, Connecticut, and he was a common competitor in Sports Car Club of America events for the rest of the decade, eventually winning several championships. He later drove in the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans in Dick Barbour's Porsche 935 and finished the race in second place.[34] Newman rejoined Dick Barbour in 2000 to compete in the Petit Le Mans.[35]
24 Hours of Le Mans career
Participating years
1979
Teams
Dick Barbour Racing
Best finish
2nd (1979)
Class wins
1 (1979)
From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, he drove for the Bob Sharp Racing team, racing mainly Datsuns (later rebranded as Nissans) in the Trans-Am Series. He became heavily associated with the brand during the '80s, even appearing in commercials for them. At the age of 70 he became the oldest driver to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race,[36] winning in his class at the 1995 24 Hours of Daytona.[37] Among his final experiences in racing was competing in the Baja 1000 in 2004 and the 24 Hours of Daytona once again in 2005.[38]
Newman initially owned his own racing team, which competed in the Can-Am series, but later co-founded Newman/Haas Racing with Carl Haas, a Champ Car team, in 1983. The 1996 racing season was chronicled in the IMAX film Super Speedway, which Newman narrated. He was also a partner in the Atlantic Championship team Newman Wachs Racing. Newman also owned a car NASCAR Winston Cup before selling it to Penske Racing, where it now serves as the #12 car.

Illness and death
Newman was scheduled to make his professional stage directing debut with the Westport Country Playhouse's 2008 production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, but he stepped down on May 23, 2008, citing health issues.[39]
In June 2008 it was widely reported that Newman, a former chain smoker, had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was receiving treatment at Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York City.[40] Photographs taken of Newman in May and June showed him looking gaunt.[41] Writer A.E. Hotchner, who partnered with Newman to start Newman's Own salad dressing company in the 1980s, told the Associated Press that Newman told him about the disease about 18 months ago.[42] Newman's spokesman told the press that the star is "doing nicely," but neither confirmed nor denied that he had cancer.[43] In August, Newman reportedly had finished chemotherapy and told his family he wished to die at home. He did so on September 26, 2008, aged 83, surrounded by his family and close friends.[44] His remains were subsequently cremated after a private funeral service near his home in Westport.
References in popular culture
Scottish rock band Dogs Die In Hot Cars wrote a song entitled "Paul Newman's Eyes" on their first album Please Describe Yourself.[46]
Artist Gil Kane based his original illustrations of Hal Jordan (the Green Lantern) on Paul Newman

Filmography, awards, and nominations

As actor
Year
Title
Role
Other notes
1954
The Silver Chalice
Basil
1956
Somebody Up There Likes Me
Rocky Graziano
The Rack
Capt. Edward W. Hall Jr.
1957
The Helen Morgan Story
Larry Maddux
Until They Sail
Capt. Jack Harding
1958
The Long, Hot Summer
Ben Quick
The Left Handed Gun
Billy the Kid
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Brick Pollitt
Nominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!
Harry Bannerman
1959
The Young Philadelphians
Anthony Judson Lawrence
1960
From the Terrace
David Alfred Eaton
Exodus
Ari Ben Canaan
1961
The Hustler
Eddie Felson
BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading RoleNominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
Paris Blues
Ram Bowen
1962
Sweet Bird of Youth
Chance Wayne
Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man
Ad Francis, 'The Battler'
Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
1963
Hud
Hud Bannon
Nominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading RoleNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
A New Kind of Love
Steve Sherman
The Prize
Andrew Craig
1964
What a Way to Go!
Larry Flint
The Outrage
Juan Carrasco
1965
Lady L
Armand Denis
1966
Harper
Lew Harper
Torn Curtain
Prof. Michael Armstrong
1967
Hombre
John Russell
Cool Hand Luke
Luke Jackson
Nominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1968
The Secret War of Harry Frigg
Pvt. Harry Frigg
1969
Winning
Frank Capua
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy
Nominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
1970
WUSA
Rheinhardt
1971
Sometimes a Great Notion
Hank Stamper
Once Upon a Wheel (1971 TV program)
Himself
Winner: World Television Festival Award,
Winner: Best International Sports Documentary
1972
Pocket Money
Jim Kane
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
Judge Roy Bean
1973
The Mackintosh Man
Joseph Rearden
The Sting
Henry Gondorff
1974
The Towering Inferno
Doug Roberts
1975
The Drowning Pool
Lew Harper
1976
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody
1977
Slap Shot
Reggie "Reg" Dunlop
1979
Quintet
Essex
1980
When Time Ran Out...
Hank Anderson
1981
Fort Apache the Bronx
Murphy
Absence of Malice
Michael Colin Gallagher
Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actor
1982
Come Along with Me
TV
The Verdict
Frank Galvin
Nominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1984
Harry & Son
Harry Keach
1986
The Color of Money
Fast Eddie Felson
Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1989
Fat Man and Little Boy
Gen. Leslie R. Groves
Blaze
Gov. Earl K. Long
1990
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
Walter Bridge
1993
La Classe américaine
Dave
in redubbed archive footage only
1994
The Hudsucker Proxy
Sidney J. Mussburger
Nobody's Fool
Donald J. "Sully" Sullivan
Nominated - Academy Award for Best ActorNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1998
Twilight
Harry Ross
1999
Message in a Bottle
Dodge Blake
2000
Where the Money Is
Henry Manning
2002
Road to Perdition
John Rooney
Nominated - Academy Award for Best Supporting ActorNominated - BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting RoleNominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
2003
Our Town
Stage Manager
Nominated - Emmy Award
2005
Empire Falls
Max Roby
Emmy Award; Golden Globe
Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D
Dave Scott
voice
2006
Cars
Doc Hudson
voice
2007
Dale
Narrator
voice

As director or producer
Year
Title
Other notes
1968
Rachel, Rachel
Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion PictureNominated - Academy Award for Best PictureNew York Film Critics Circle Award (best director)[48]
1969
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Co-executive producer (uncredited)
Winning
Co-executive producer (uncredited)
1970
WUSA
Co-producer
1971
Sometimes a Great Notion
Director and co-executive producer
They Might Be Giants
producer
1972
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
Director and producer
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
Co-executive producer (uncredited)
1980
The Shadow Box
Nominated - Emmy Award for Best Director for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special
1984
Harry & Son
Director and producer
1984
The Glass Menagerie
2005
Empire Falls
Producer, Nominated: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries

Additional awards and honors

Academy Awards
Honorary Award
For his "many and memorable and compelling screen performances" (1986)
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
For his charity work (1994)

Golden Globe Awards
New Star of the Year — Actor
The Silver Chalice (1957)
Henrietta Award
World Film Favorite — Male (1964; 1966)
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Lifetime Achievement (1984)

Other
Newman won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for The Long, Hot Summer and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Nobody's Fool.
In 1968, Newman was named "Man of the Year" by Harvard University's performance group, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
Newman Day has been celebrated at Kenyon College, Bates College, Princeton University, and other American colleges since the 1970s.

Published work
Newman, Paul and A. E. Hotchner. Newman's Own Cookbook. Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0684848325.
Newman, Paul and A. E. Hotchner. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. Doubleday Publishing, 2003.

David Lynch
Born
David Keith LynchJanuary 20, 1946 (1946-01-20) (age 62)Missoula, Montana
Years active
1966 - present
Spouse(s)
Peggy Lynch (1967-1974)Mary Fisk (1977-1987)Mary Sweeney (2006)
Awards won
César Awards
Best Foreign Film1981 The Elephant Man2001 Mulholland Drive
Golden Globe Awards
Best Drama Series1991 Twin Peaks
Other awards
BSFC Award for Best Director1986 Blue Velvet2001 Mulholland DriveGolden Palm1990 Wild at HeartBest Director Award (Cannes Film Festival)2001 Mulholland DriveCFCA Award for Best Director2001 Mulholland DriveLAFCA Award for Best Director1986 Blue Velvet2001 Mulholland DriveNSFC Award for Best Director1986 Blue VelvetOFCS Award for Best Director2001 Mulholland DriveSDFCS Award for Best Director1999 The Straight StoryTFCA Award for Best Director2001 Mulholland DriveCareer Golden Lion2006 Lifetime Achievement
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American director, screenwriter, producer, painter, cartoonist, composer, video and performance artist. Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for The Elephant Man (1980),[1] Blue Velvet (1986),[2] and Mulholland Drive (2001).[3] Lynch has won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival.
Over a lengthy career, Lynch has employed a distinctive and unorthodox approach to narrative film making (dubbed Lynchian), which has become instantly recognizable to many audiences and critics worldwide. Lynch's films are known for surreal, nightmarish and dreamlike images and meticulously crafted sound design. Lynch's work often explores the seedy underside of "Small Town U.S." (particularly Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks), or sprawling California metropolises (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and his latest release, Inland Empire). Beginning with his experimental film school feature Eraserhead (1977), he has maintained a strong cult following despite inconsistent commercial success.

Biography

Early life
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946.[4] His father, Donald, was a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist and his mother, Sunny Lynch, was an English language tutor.[4] He was raised throughout the Pacific Northwest and Durham, North Carolina. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout and, on his 15th birthday, served as an usher at John F. Kennedy's Presidential Inauguration.[4] Lynch is a Presbyterian.[5][6] His mother's father, whose last name was Sandholm, moved to the United States from Finland in the 19th century, and Lynch is one of the most well-known Finnish Americans.
Intending to become an artist, Lynch attended classes at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. while finishing high school in Alexandria, Virginia. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year (where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf[7]) before leaving for Europe with his friend and fellow artist Jack Fisk, planning to study with Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Although he had planned to stay for three years, Lynch returned to the US after only 15 days.

Early career and short films (1966–1970)
In 1966, Lynch relocated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and made a series of complex mosaics in geometric shapes which he called Industrial Symphonies. Lynch's receipt for his first camera, purchased in Philadelphia on April 25, 1967 at Fotorama, lists his residency as 2429 Aspen Street. This house is located in Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood, also known as the Art Museum neighborhood. The receipt can be viewed on The Short Films of David Lynch. At this time, he also began working in film. His first short film Six Men Getting Sick (1966), which he described as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", was played on a loop at an art exhibit. It won the Academy's annual film contest. This led to a commission from H. Barton Wasserman to do a film installation in his home. After a disastrous first attempt that resulted in a completely blurred, frameless print, Wasserman allowed Lynch to keep the remaining portion of the commission. Using this, he created The Alphabet.
In 1970, Lynch turned his attention away from fine art and focused primarily on film. He won a $5,000 grant from the American Film Institute to produce The Grandmother, about a neglected boy who “grows” a grandmother from a seed. The 30-minute film exhibited many elements that would become Lynch trademarks, including unsettling sound and surrealistic imagery and a focus on unconscious desires instead of traditional narration.

Cult success (1975–1979)
In 1971, Lynch moved to Los Angeles to attend the M.F.A. studies at the AFI Conservatory. At the Conservatory, Lynch began working on his first feature-length film, Eraserhead, using a $10,000 grant from the AFI. The grant did not provide enough money to complete the film and, due to lack of a sufficient budget, Eraserhead was filmed intermittently until 1977. Lynch used money from friends and family, including boyhood friend Jack Fisk, a production designer and the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, and even took a paper route to finish it.
A stark and enigmatic film, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man (Jack Nance) living in an industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a constantly crying mutant baby. Lynch has referred to Eraserhead as "my Philadelphia story", meaning it reflects all of the dangerous and fearful elements he encountered while studying and living in Philadelphia.[8] He said "this feeling left its traces deep down inside me. And when it came out again, it became Eraserhead".
The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable, but thanks to the efforts of The Elgin Theatre distributor Ben Barenholtz, it became an instant cult classic and was a staple of midnight movie showings for the next decade. It was also a critical success, launching Lynch to the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking. Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films.It cemented the team of actors and technicians who would continue to define the texture of his work for years to come, including cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, and actor Jack Nance.

Rise to prominence (1980–1986)

David Lynch on the set of Blue Velvet with Kyle MacLachlan.
Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of producer Mel Brooks, who hired him to direct 1980's The Elephant Man, a biopic of deformed Victorian era figure Joseph Merrick. The film was a huge commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch. It also established his place as a commercially viable, if somewhat dark and unconventional, Hollywood director. George Lucas, a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi, which he refused, feeling that it would be more Lucas's vision than his own.[8]
Afterwards, Lynch agreed to direct a big budget adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune for Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis's De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, on the condition that the company release a second Lynch project, over which the director would have complete creative control. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be the next Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud, costing $45 million to make, and grossing a mere $27.4 million domestically. The studio released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television in which some footage was reinstated; however, certain shots from elsewhere in the film were repeated throughout the story to give the impression that other footage had been added. Whatever the case, this was not representative of Lynch's intended cut, but rather a cut that the studio felt was more comprehensible than the original theatrical version. Lynch objected to these changes and disowned the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director. This version has since been released on video worldwide.

Lynch at the 1990 Emmy Awards ceremony.
Lynch's second De Laurentiis-financed project was 1986's Blue Velvet, the story of a college student (Kyle MacLachlan) who discovers his small, idealistic hometown hides a dark side after investigating a severed ear he found in a field. The film featured memorable performances from Isabella Rossellini as a tormented lounge singer, and Dennis Hopper as a crude, psychopathic criminal, and the leader of a small gang of backwater hoodlums.
Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and commercial success. Thus, the film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The content of the film and its artistic merit drew much controversy from audiences and critics alike in 1986 and onwards. Blue Velvet introduced several common elements of his work, including abused women, the dark underbelly of small towns, and unconventional uses of vintage songs. Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" are both featured in unconventional ways. It was also the first time Lynch worked with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who would contribute to all of his future full-length films except INLAND EMPIRE.
Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favourite film of the year.[11] The film is consistently ranked as one of the greatest American films ever made, and has become a hugely influential motion picture, the impact of which is still being felt in Hollywood and popular culture.

Continued success (1987-1996) and transition to TV
After failing to secure funding for several completed scripts in the late 1980s, Lynch collaborated with television producer Mark Frost on the show Twin Peaks, which was about a small Washington town that is the location of several bizarre occurrences. The show centered around the investigation by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) into the death of popular high school student Laura Palmer, an investigation that unearthed the secrets of many town residents, something that stemmed from Blue Velvet. Lynch directed six episodes of the series, including the feature-length pilot, wrote or co-wrote several more and even acted in some episodes.
The show debuted on the ABC Network on April 8, 1990 and gradually rose from cult hit to cultural phenomenon, and because of its originality and success remains one of the most well-known television series of the decade. Catch phrases from the show entered the culture and parodies of it were seen on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. Lynch appeared on the cover of Time magazine largely because of the success of the series. Lynch, who has seldom acted in his career, also appeared on the show as the partially-deaf FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, who shouted his every word.
However, Lynch clashed with the ABC Network on several matters, particularly whether or not to reveal Laura Palmer's killer. The network insisted that the revelation be made during the second season but Lynch wanted the mystery to last as long as the series. Lynch soon became disenchanted with the series, and, as a result, many cast members complained of feeling abandoned. Later, in a roundtable discussion with cast members included in the 2007 DVD release of the series, he stated that he and Frost never intended to ever reveal the identity of Laura's killer, that ABC forced him to reveal the culprit prematurely, and that agreeing to do so is one of his biggest professional regrets.[12]
It was at this time that Lynch began to work with editor/producer/domestic partner Mary Sweeney who had been one of his assistant editors on Blue Velvet. This was a collaboration that would last some eleven projects. During this period, Sweeney also gave birth to their son.
Adapted from the novel by Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart was an almost hallucinatory crime/road movie starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival but was met with a muted response from American critics and viewers. Reportedly, several people walked out of test screenings.
The missing link between Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, however, is Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. It was originally presented on-stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City on November 10, 1989 as a part of the New Music America Festival. Industrial Symphony No. 1 is another collaboration between composer Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. It features five songs by Julee Cruise and stars several members of the Twin Peaks cast as well as Nic Cage, Laura Dern and Julee Cruise. Lynch described this musical spectacle as the "sound effects and music and ... happening on the stage. And, it has something to do with, uh, a relationship ending." David Lynch produced a 50 minute video of the performance in 1990.
Twin Peaks suffered a severe ratings drop and was canceled in 1991. Still, Lynch scripted a prequel to the series about the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer. The resulting film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), flopped at the box office.
As a quick blip during this time period, he and Mark Frost wrote and directed several episodes of the short lived comedy series On the Air for ABC, which followed the zany antics at a 1950s TV studio. In the US, only three episodes were aired, although seven were filmed. In the Netherlands, all seven were aired by VPRO. BBC2 in the UK also aired all seven episodes. Lynch also produced (with Frost) and directed the documentary television series American Chronicles.
His next project was much more low-key: he directed two episodes of a three-episode HBO mini-series called Hotel Room about events that happened in the same hotel room in a span of decades.

Comic strip (1983–1992)
Lynch also had a comic strip – The Angriest Dog in the World – which featured unchanging graphics (various panels showing the angular, angry dog chained up in a yard full of bones) and cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications.

Recent works (1997–present)

Lynch speaking at an Amazon.com reception in January 2007.
In 1997, Lynch returned with the non-linear, noir-like film Lost Highway, co-written by Barry Gifford and starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. The film failed commercially and received a mixed response from critics. However, thanks in part to a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and The Smashing Pumpkins, it helped gain Lynch a new audience of Generation X viewers.
In 1999, Lynch surprised fans and critics with the G-rated, Disney-produced The Straight Story, written and edited by Mary Sweeney, which was, on the surface, a simple and humble movie telling the true story of Iowan Alvin Straight, played by Richard Farnsworth, who rides a lawnmower to Wisconsin to make peace with his ailing brother, played by Harry Dean Stanton. The film garnered positive reviews and reached a new audience for its director.
The same year, Lynch approached ABC once again with an idea for a television drama. The network gave Lynch the go-ahead to shoot a two-hour pilot for the series Mulholland Drive, but disputes over content and running time led to the project being shelved indefinitely.
With seven million dollars from the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch completed the pilot as a film. Mulholland Drive is an enigmatic tale of the dark side of Hollywood and stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. The film performed relatively well at the box office worldwide and was a critical success earning Lynch a Best Director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There) and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association.
Film critic Roger Ebert, notoriously unfavorable towards Lynch, accusing him of misogyny in his reviews of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart.[13][14] seemed to have had a change of heart wrote enthusiastic reviews of both The Straight Story[15] and Mulholland Drive.[16]
In 2002, Lynch created a series of online shorts entitled Dumbland. Intentionally crude both in content and execution, the eight-episode series was later released on DVD.[17] The same year, Lynch treated his fans to his own version of a sitcom via his website - Rabbits, eight episodes of surrealism in a rabbit suit. Later, he showed his experiments with Digital Video (DV) in the form of the Japanese style horror short Darkened Room.
At the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Lynch announced that he had spent over a year shooting his new project digitally in Poland. The feature, titled Inland Empire, included Lynch regulars such as Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Mulholland Drive star Justin Theroux, with cameos by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring (actors in the rabbit suits), and a performance by Jeremy Irons. Lynch described the piece as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". It was released in December 2006. In an effort to promote the film, Lynch made appearances with a cow and a placard bearing the slogan "Without cheese there would be no Inland Empire".
Despite his almost exclusive focus on America, Lynch has found a large audience in France; Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Fire Walk With Me were all funded through French production companies.
The most recent work that Lynch has directed is a fragrance short film/commercial for Gucci. It features 3 prominent models, dancing in what appear to be their own luxurious homes, to the soundtrack of Blondie. A video of the commercial plus a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the commercial is available online at the Gucci website.
In May 2008, Lynch announced that he was working on a road documentary "about his dialogues with regular folk on the meaning of life, with the likes of 60’s troubadour Donovan and John Hagelin, the physicist, as traveling companions.
Awards and honors
Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film and served as President of the jury at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where he had previously won the Palme d'Or in 1990. On September 6. 2006 Lynch received a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. He also premiered his latest work, Inland Empire, at the festival.[19]
Lynch has received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), as well as Best Adapted Screenplay for The Elephant Man (1980).
Lynch was also honored by the French government with the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as Chevalier in 2002 then Officier in 2007.[20]

Frequent collaborators
Main article: Frequent David Lynch collaborators
Lynch is also widely noted for his collaborations with various production artists and composers on his films and multiple different productions. He frequently works with Angelo Badalamenti to compose music for his productions, former wife Mary Sweeney as a film editor, casting director Johanna Ray, and cast members Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern.

Themes
Though interpretations do vary, those who study Lynch's work generally do find such images to represent consistent or semi-consistent themes throughout his body of work. Also, Lynch often includes either small town United States in his films as a setting or location, for example Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, or sprawling metropolis, for example Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, where Los Angeles, California becomes the primary location. Beaten or abused women are also a common theme or subject in his productions, as are intimations or explicit mention of sexual abuse and incest (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and some would pick up references in Mulholland Dr, The Alphabet and The Grandmother.).
On a similar note, he has also developed a tendency during the second half of his career to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, thus many of his characters have multiple, fractured identities in his films. Starting with the choice to cast Sheryl Lee both as Laura Palmer and as twin cousin Maddy Ferguson on Twin Peaks it continues to be a primary theme in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette has the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield. In Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts was cast as Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring as Camilla Rhodes/Rita. The theme is even further carried out by Laura Dern's performance in his latest production Inland Empire. Though there are instances in these films of men taking on multiple roles, it seems more common for Lynch to create multi-character roles for his female actors.

Influences
Lynch has expressed his admiration for filmmakers Jacques Tati, Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, writer Franz Kafka (stating "the only artist I felt could be my brother was Kafka"), and artist Francis Bacon. He states that the majority of Kubrick films are in his top ten, that he really loves Kafka, and that Bacon paints images that are both visually stunning, and emotionally touching. He has also cited the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka as an inspiration for his works. Lynch has a love for the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz and frequently makes reference to it in his films, most overtly in Wild at Heart.
An early influence on Lynch was the book The Art Spirit by American turn-of-the-century artist and teacher Robert Henri. When he was in high school, Bushnell Keeler, an artist who was the stepfather of one of his friends, introduced Lynch to Henri's book, which became his bible. As Lynch said in Chris Rodley's book Lynch on Lynch, "it helped me decide my course for painting — 100 percent right there." Lynch, like Henri, moved from rural America to an urban environment to pursue an artistic career. Henri was an urban realist painter, legitimizing every day city life as the subject of his work, much in the same way that Lynch first drew street scenes. Henri's work also bridged changing centuries, from America's agricultural 19th century into the industrial 20th century, much in the same fashion as Lynch's films blend the nostalgic happiness of the fifties to the twisted weirdness of the eighties and nineties.
His influences have also included Luis Buñuel, Werner Herzog, Roman Polanski, Billy Wilder, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. Some of them have cited Lynch as an influence themselves, most notably Kubrick, who stated that he modeled his vision of The Shining (1980) upon that of Eraserhead and who, according to Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish, once commented while screening Eraserhead for a small group that it was his favorite film. Mario Bava, the prolific Italian horror filmmaker, has frequently been cited as an influence on Lynch
Unfinished and unrealized projects
Gardenback: After the success he had enjoyed with "The Grandmother", Lynch moved to Beverly Hills to participate in the AFI's Center for Advanced Film. Lynch began working on a script for a short film called "Gardenback" in 1970. Lynch spent the whole year working on a 45-page script. The film was to explore the physical materialization of what grows inside a man's head when he desires a woman that he sees. This manifestation metamorphoses into a monster
Cinematographer/director Caleb Deschanel, who was also at the AFI at the time and wanted to shoot the film, introduced Lynch to a producer at 20th Century Fox. The studio was interested in making a series of low-budget horror films and wanted to expand "Gardenback" into a feature film. The studio was willing to give Lynch $50,000 to make it but wanted the 45-page script to be expanded. This involved writing dialogue -- something Lynch had never tried before. Lynch said in Lynch on Lynch, "What I wrote was pretty much worthless, but something happened inside me about structure, about scenes. And I don't even know what it was, but it sort of percolated down and became part of me. But the script was pretty much worthless. I knew I'd just watered it down." Consequently, Lynch became disenchanted with the project. Some of the elements in "Gardenback" would later surface in Eraserhead, such as its main characters Henry and Mary X.
Dune Messiah: Lynch was in the process of writing the sequel to film Dune (which was partially adapted from the book), but the box office failure of the first film killed the project. From the Inner Views Lynch interview, "...I was really getting into Dune II. I wrote about half the script, maybe more, and I was really getting excited about it. It was much tighter, a better story." From a Prevue article from 1984: "Lynch has written two sequel screenplays to Dune – Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, based on Herbert's succeeding novels – which currently await the author's approval. Back-to-back lensing is expected if the first film is a success. Although Kyle MacLachlan will portray Paul Atreides in the three Dune spectacles, Lynch promises a different cast each time."
Untitled animated short, 1969 or 1970: Though David doesn't remember what the film itself was about, he distinctly recalls that he was paid to produce a short film and the negatives came back from the lab messed up.
Ronnie Rocket
Red Dragon: Before making Blue Velvet, the film's producer, Richard Roth, approached Lynch with another project -- an adaptation of Thomas Harris' novel, Red Dragon. Lynch was turned off by the content of the book and Roth subsequently took the project to Michael Mann who went on to direct the film as Manhunter (1986).
The Lemurians: This was a TV show that Lynch was going to do with Mark Frost based on the continent of Lemuria. Their premise for the show was that Lemurian essence was leaking from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and becomes a threat to the world. It was intended to be a comedy but when Lynch and Frost tried to pitch this show to NBC, the network rejected it.
Goddess: When Lynch and Frost first met, they began working on a project about Marilyn Monroe. Lynch had been fascinated by the actress' life and met with Anthony Summers who wrote a biography of the same name. The more they worked on it, the more they became embroiled in conspiracy theories involving Monroe and the Kennedys which turned Lynch off the project. Twin Peaks was created soon after, which has similarities with the story of Monroe.
One Saliva Bubble: This was a comedy that Lynch co-wrote with Mark Frost and intended to direct with Steve Martin and Martin Short starring. It was set in Kansas. Robert Engels describes the premise of the film in Lynch on Lynch: "It's about an electric bubble from a computer that bursts over this town and changes people's personalities – like these five cattlemen, who suddenly think they're Chinese gymnasts. It's insane!"
The White Hotel: Lynch was attached to Dennis Potter's adaptation of D.M. Thomas' novel during the late 1980s.
I'll Test My Log With Every Branch of Knowledge: Around the time that Lynch and Catherine Coulson made "The Amputee", he had an idea for a TV show. He told Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch, "It's a half-hour television show starring Catherine as the lady with the log. Her husband has been killed in a forest fire and his ashes are on the mantelpiece, with his pipes and his sock hat. He was a woodsman. But the fireplace is completely boarded up. Because she now is very afraid of fire." This project never got off the ground, but when it came time to film the pilot for Twin Peaks, Lynch remembered this idea and called Coulson up to appear as the Log Lady.
Metamorphosis: This was intended to be an adaptation of the story written by Franz Kafka. Lynch has expressed on several accounts his desire to film the story of Metamorphosis. He has even written a script. The main reason that Lynch has not filmed it is a matter of money and technology involving the transformation of a man into a beetle.
The Dream of the Bovine: Lynch and Robert Engels wrote the screenplay for this film after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. According to Engels in Lynch on Lynch, the film was about "three guys, who used to be cows, living in Van Nuys and trying to assimilate their lives."

Personal life

Lynch speaking in Washington D.C., January 23, 2007
Lynch tends to keep his personal life private and rarely comments on his films. However, he does attend public events and film festivals when he or his films are nominated/awarded. Despite a belief that a film should be seen in its totality, the DVD release of Inland Empire is divided into chapters, with Lynch explaining why in the "Stories" feature. In addition, on his two DVD collections of short films, Lynch provides short introductions to each film.
In the 1980s, Lynch expressed that he liked Ronald Reagan and at one point he had dinner with the Reagans at the White House, though he sees himself as a Libertarian or Democrat.[22]
In the "Stories" feature on the Eraserhead DVD, Lynch mentions that he ate French fries and grilled cheese almost every day while on the set. Despite his professional accomplishments, Lynch once characterized himself simply as "Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana".[23]
In 1967, Lynch married Peggy Lentz in Chicago, Illinois.[24] They had one child, Jennifer Chambers Lynch, born in 1968, who currently works as a film director. They filed for divorce in 1974. On June 21, 1977, Lynch married Mary Fisk, and the couple had one child, Austin Jack Lynch, born in 1982. They divorced in 1987, and Lynch began dating Isabella Rossellini, after filming Blue Velvet.
Lynch and Rossellini broke up in 1991, and Lynch developed a relationship with Mary Sweeney, with whom he had one son, Riley Lynch, in 1992. Sweeney also worked as long-time film editor/producer to Lynch and co-wrote and produced The Straight Story. The two married in May 2006, but divorced later in July.

Transcendental Meditation
In December 2, 2005, Lynch told the Washington Post that he had been practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) twice a day, for 20 minutes each time, for 32 years.[25] He was initiated into TM on July 1, 1973, at 11:00 a.m., in a TM Center at Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles[26] by a teacher he thought "looked like Doris Day".[27] Since then he never missed a program. He advocates its use in bringing peace to the world. In July 2005, he launched the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace[28][29] to fund research about TM's positive effects, and he promotes the technique and his vision by an ongoing tour of college campuses that began in September 2005.[30] A streaming video of one of Lynch's public performances is available at his foundation's website.
Lynch is working for the establishment of seven "peace palaces", each with 8000 salaried people practicing advanced techniques of TM, "pumping peace for the world." He estimates the cost at $7 billion. As of December 2005, he had spent $400,000 of his own money and raised $1 million in donations from a handful of wealthy individuals and organizations.[25] In December 2006, the New York Times reported that he continued to have that goal.[28]
Lynch has written a book, Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher/Penguin 2006), which discusses the impact of TM on his creative process. He is donating all author's royalties to the David Lynch Foundation.

Other interests
Lynch maintains an interest in other art forms. He described the twentieth century artist Francis Bacon as "to me, the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter". He continues to present art installations and stage designs. In his spare time, he also designs and builds furniture. He started building furniture from his own designs as far back as his art school days. He built sheds during the making of Eraserhead, and many of the sets and furniture used in that movie are made by Lynch. He also made some of the furniture for Fred Madison's house in Lost Highway.
Lynch was the subject of a major art retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, Paris from March May 3-27 2007. The show was entitled The Air is on Fire and included numerous paintings, photographs, drawings, alternative films and sound work. New site-specific art installations were created specially for the exhibition. A series of events accompanied the exhibition including live performances and concerts.[31] Some of Lynch's art include photographs of dissected chickens and other animals as a "Build your own Chicken" toy ad.
Between 1983 and 1992, Lynch wrote and drew a weekly comic strip called The Angriest Dog in the World for the L.A. Reader. The drawings in the panels never change — just the captions. The comic strip originated from a time in Lynch's life when he was filled with anger.
Lynch has also been involved in a number of musical projects, many of them related to his films. Most notably he produced and wrote lyrics for Julee Cruise's first two albums, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love (1993), in collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti who composed the music and also produced. Lynch has also worked on the 1998 Jocelyn Montgomery album Lux Vivens. He has also composed bits of music for Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, and Rabbits. In 2001 he released BlueBob, a rock album performed by Lynch and John Neff. The album is notable for Lynch's unusual guitar playing style: he plays "upside down and backwards, like a lap guitar", and relies heavily on effects pedals.[32] Most recently Lynch has composed several pieces for Inland Empire, including two songs, "Ghost of Love" and "Walkin' on the Sky" in which he makes his public debut as a singer.
Lynch designed his personal website, a site exclusive to paying members, where he posts short videos and his absurdist series Dumbland, plus interviews and other items. The site also features a daily weather report, where Lynch gives a brief description of the weather in Los Angeles, where he resides. An absurd ringtone ("I like to kill deer") from the website was a common sound bite on The Howard Stern Show in early 2006.
Lynch is an avid coffee drinker and even has his own line of special organic blends available for purchase on his website. Called "David Lynch Signature Cup", the coffee has been advertised via flyers included with several recent Lynch-related DVD releases, including Inland Empire and the Gold Box edition of Twin Peaks. The self-mocking tag-line for the brand is "It's all in the beans ... and I'm just full of beans
Filmography

Features
Year
Film
Oscars
BAFTA
Golden Globe
Nominations
Wins
Nominations
Wins
Nominations
Wins
1977
Eraserhead
1980
The Elephant Man

1984
Dune

1986
Blue Velvet
1990
Wild at Heart
1992
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
1997
Lost Highway
1999
The Straight Story
Mulholland Drive

2006
Inland Empire

Music videos
Chris Isaak - "Wicked Game" (version 1) (1990)
Michael Jackson - "Dangerous" (1992)
Yoshiki - "Longing" (1995)

Short films
Six Men Getting Sick (1966)
The Alphabet (1968)
The Grandmother (1970)
The Amputee (1974)
The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988)
Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted (1990)
Lumière:Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1996)
Darkened Room (2002)
Ballerina (2006) (Inland Empire Extra)
Boat (2007)
The Short Films of David Lynch

TV, advertisements and digital
Twin Peaks (TV series) (1990-91)
Obsession (Calvin Klein commercial) (1990)
American Chronicles (documentary television series) (1990)
Giò (Giorgio Armani commercial) (1992)
On the Air (TV series) (1992)
Hotel Room (TV mini-series) (1993)
The Wall (Adidas commercial) (1995)
Rabbits (Online series) (2002)
Dumbland (Online Flash animation series) (2002)
The Third Place (video for Sony Playstation 2 launch) (2000)
Gucci (Gucci commercial) (2008)

Acting
The Amputee (1974) as a nurse
Heart Beat (1980) as a painter (uncredited)
Dune (1984) as a spice miner (uncredited)
Zelly and Me (1988) as Willie, Isabella Rossellini's character's love interest
Twin Peaks (1990) as Agent Cooper's boss, FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), reprising his role as Gordon Cole
Nadja (1994) brief scene as a morgue receptionist
Dumb Land (2002) - Lynch provides all the voices for this made-for-internet animated series.
Inland Empire (2006) as the voice of "Bucky", an unseen film crew member. (uncredited)

Michael Curtiz
Born
Manó Kertész KaminerDecember 24, 1886(1886-12-24)Budapest, Hungary (Austria-Hungary)
Died
April 10, 1962 (aged 75)Hollywood, California, U.S.
Spouse(s)
Lucy Doraine (1918-1923)Lili Damita (1925-1926)[citation needed]Bess Meredyth (1929-1961)
[show]Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Director1943 Casablanca
Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 - April 10, 1962) was an Academy Award-winning Hungarian-American film director. He directed at least 50 films in Europe and a further hundred in the United States, among the best-known being The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
Life

Early life
Curtiz was born Manó Kertész Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born on December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912

Details of his early experience as a director are sparse, and it is not clear what part he may have played in the direction of several early films, but he is known to have directed at least one film in Hungary before spending six months in 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. While in Denmark, Curtiz worked as the assistant director for August Blom on Denmark's first multi-reel feature film, Atlantis. On the outbreak of World War I, he briefly served in the artillery of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but he had returned to film-making by 1915. In that or the following year he married for the first time, to actress Lucy Doraine. The couple divorced in 1923.
Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalised in 1919, and soon settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for Sascha Films, among them the Biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924). The latter, released in the US as Moon of Israel, caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz for his own studio with the intention of having him direct a similar film for Warner Brothers -- Noah's Ark, which was eventually produced in 1928. Curtiz's second marriage, to another actress, Lili Damita, lasted from 1925 to 1926.[citation needed] When he went to America, Curtiz left behind at least one illegitimate son and one illegitimate daughter
Career in the US
Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926 (according to some sources on the fourth of July, but according to others in June).[3] He took the anglicised name "Michael Curtiz". He had a lengthy and prolific Hollywood career, with directing credits on over 100 films in many film genres. During the 30s, Curtiz was often credited on four films in a single year, although he was not always the sole director on these projects. In the pre-Code period, Curtiz directed such films as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Doctor X (both shot in two-strip Technicolor), and The Kennel Murder Case.
In the mid-30s, he began the highly successful cycle of adventure films starring Errol Flynn that included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk and Santa Fe Trail (1940).
By the early 1940s Curtiz had become fairly wealthy, earning $3,600 per week and owning a substantial estate, complete with polo pitch.[4] One of his regular polo partners was Hal Wallis, who had met Curtiz on his arrival in the country and had established a close friendship with him. Wallis' wife, the actress Louise Fazenda, and Curtiz's third wife, Bess Meredyth, an actress and screenwriter, had been close since before Curtiz's marriage to Meredyth in 1929. Curtiz was frequently unfaithful, and had numerous sexual relationships with extras on set; Meredyth once left him for a short time, but they remained married until 1961, shortly before Curtiz's death.[5] She was Curtiz's helper whenever his need to deal with scripts or other elements went beyond his grasp of English, and he often phoned her for advice when presented with a problem while filming.[6]
Prime examples of his work in the 1940s are The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). During this period he also directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943), which was commissioned at the request of president Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to aid the wartime effort. Other Curtiz efforts included Four Daughters 1938, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Life With Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn and The Breaking Point (1950).
While Curtiz himself had escaped Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not so lucky. His sister's family were sent to Auschwitz, where her husband and three children died. Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund, a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the US
In the late 1940s, he made a new agreement with Warners under which the studio and his own production company were to share the costs and profits of his subsequent films. These films did poorly, however, whether as part of the general decline in the film industry in this period or because Curtiz "had no skills in shaping the entirety of a picture".[8] Either way, as Curtiz himself said, "You are only appreciated so far as you carry the dough into the box office. They throw you into gutter next day".[9] The long partnership between director and studio descended into a bitter court battle.
After his relationship with Warners broke down, Curtiz continued to direct on a freelance basis from 1954 onwards. The Egyptian (1954) for Fox starring Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney. He directed many films for Paramount, including White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye; We're No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart; and King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. His final film, The Comancheros, was released less than a year before his death from cancer on April 10, 1962. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Personal life
Curtiz was always extremely active: he worked very long days, took part in several sports in his spare time, and was often found to sleep under a cold shower.[10] He was dismissive of actors who ate lunch, believing that "lunch bums" had no energy for work in the afternoons. The flip side of his dedication was an often callous demeanour: Fay Wray said that, "I felt that he was not flesh and bones, that he was part of the steel of the camera".[11] He was not popular with most of his colleagues, many of whom thought him arrogant.[12] He reserved most of his venom for subordinates rather than his stars, frequently quarreling with his technicians and dismissing one extra by saying, "More to your right. More. More. Now you are out of the scene. Go home".[13] Bette Davis refused to work with him again after he called her a "goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch"; he had a low opinion of actors in general, saying that acting "is fifty percent a big bag of tricks. The other fifty percent should be talent and ability, although it seldom is". Nevertheless, he did not offend everyone: he treated Ingrid Bergman with courtesy on the set of Casablanca, while Claude Rains credited him with teaching him the difference between film and theater acting, or, "what not to do in front of a camera".[14]
Curtiz had a lifelong struggle with the English language and there are many anecdotes about his failures. He bewildered a set dresser on Casablanca by demanding a 'poodle', when he actually wanted a puddle of water. David Niven liked Curtiz's phrase "bring on the empty horses" (for "bring on the horses without riders") so much that he used it for the title of the second volume of his memoirs.

Criticism
Harmetz states that, "Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices".[15]
Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz did have his own distinctive style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows".[16] This style was not purely visual, but had the effect of highlighting the character's relationship to his environment; often this environment was identified with the fate in which the character was trapped.This entrapment then forces the "morally divided" protagonist to make a moral choice. While Rosenzweig accepts that almost every film involves such moral dilemmas to some extent, it is Curtiz's directorial decisions which place the element center stage in his films, albeit at an emotional rather than an intellectual level
Awards
Curtiz received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director: before Casablanca won in 1943, he was nominated for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, and for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1938. Captain Blood came second as a write-in nomination in 1936.

Selected Hollywood filmography
Main article: Michael Curtiz filmography
The Mad Genius (1931) with John Barrymore and Marian Marsh
The Cabin in the Cotton (1932) with Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis
Doctor X (1932) with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill
Goodbye Again (1933) with Warren William and Joan Blondell
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) with Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell
The Kennel Murder Case (1933) with William Powell as Philo Vance
Jimmy the Gent (1934) with James Cagney and Bette Davis
Front Page Woman (1935) with Bette Davis and George Brent
Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart
Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
Santa Fe Trail (1940) with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan
Virginia City (1940) with Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart
The Sea Hawk (1940) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
The Sea Wolf (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield
Casablanca (1942) with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) with James Cagney and Walter Huston
Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth
Night and Day (1946) with Cary Grant as Cole Porter
The Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal
I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), a biopic of composer and lyricist Gus Kahn, with Doris Day and Danny Thomas
White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney
The Egyptian (1954) with Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney
We're No Angels (1955) with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov
King Creole (1958) with Elvis Presley and Walter Matthau
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960) with Eddie Hodges, Tony Randall and Patty McCormick
The Comancheros (1961) with John Wayne and Stuart Whitman
Awards and achievements
Preceded byWilliam Wylerfor Mrs. Miniver
Academy Award for Best Director1943for Casablanca
Succeeded byLeo McCareyfor Going My Way