Famous people in the world of cinema. This week…

              Walt Disney and Charles Chaplin!! 

  

WALT DISNEY

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

QUICK FACTS

NAME

Walt Disney

OCCUPATION

 Producer

BIRTH DATE

 December 5, 1901

DEATH DATE

December 15, 1966

EDUCATION

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

PLACE OF BIRTH

Chicago, Illinois

PLACE OF DEATH

 Burbank, California

AKA

Walt Disney

FULL NAME

Walter Elias Disney

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

His brother Roy got him a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met the cartoonist  Ub Iwerks. Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on  animation. Around this time, Disney began experimenting with a camera, doing hand-drawn animation, and he decided to open his own animation business. From the company.

Walt made a deal with a local Kansas City theater to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams. The cartoons were very popular and Disney was able to acquire his own studio, upon which he bestowed the same name. Laugh-O-Gram hired a number of employees. They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined  live action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland.

Disney and his brother, Roy, soon joined their money and moved to Hollywood and to began the Disney Brothers' Studio. Their first deal was with New York distributor Margaret Winkler, to distribute their Alice cartoons. They also invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

In 1925, Disney toke on an  artist named Lillian Bounds and the couple married.

Mickey Mouse

He decided to produce three cartoons featuring a new character Walt had been developing called Mickey Mouse. The first animated shorts of Mickey were Plane Crazy, a silent film for which they failed to find distribution. When sound made its way into film, Disney created a third, sound-and-music-equipped short called Steamboat Willie. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon was an instant sensation. 

In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which featured Mickey's newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme.
Disneyland Park opened in the summer of 1955. It became known as a place where children and their families could explore, take rides and meet the Disney characters. 

Disneyland

In a very short time, the park had increased its investment and was entertaining tourists from around the world. With the original site having some attendance ups and downs over the years, Disneyland has expanded its rides over time and branched out globally with parks in Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong, with a Shanghai location slated to open in December 2015.

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

CHARLES CHAPLIN

He was born on April 16, 1889, in London, England. Charlie Chaplin worked with a children's dance troupe before making his mark on the big screen. His character "The Tramp" relied on pantomime and quirky movements to become an iconic figure of the silent-film era. Chaplin went on to become a director, making films such as City Lights and Modern Times, and co-founded the United Artists Corporation. He died in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland, on December 25, 1977.

Beginning of his career  

When he was about twelve, he got his first chance to act in a legitimate stage show, and appeared as
"Billy" the page boy, in support of William Gillette in "Sherlock Holmes". At the close of this engagement, Charlie started a career as a comedian in vaudeville, which eventually took him to the United States in 1910 as a featured player with the Fred Karno Repertoire Company.

Film Career

In 1914 Chaplin made his film debut in a somewhat forgettable one-reeler called Make a Living. To differentiate himself from the clad of other actors in Sennett films, Chaplin decided to play a single identifiable character, and "The Little Tramp" was born, with audiences getting their first taste of him inKid Auto Races at Venice (1914).

Over the next year, Chaplin appeared in 35 movies. During his first year with the company, Chaplin made 14 films, including The Tramp (1915). Generally regarded as the actor's first classic, the story establishes Chaplin's character as the unexpected hero when he saves the farmer's daughter from a gang of robbers.

By the age of 26, Chaplin, just three years removed from his vaudeville days, was a superstar. He'd moved over to the Mutual Company, which paid him a whopping $670,000 a year. The money made Chaplin a wealthy man, but it didn't seem to derail his artistic drive. With Mutual, he made some of his best work, including One A.M. (1916), The Rink (1916), The Vagabond (1916) andEasy Street (1917).

Through his work, Chaplin came to be known as a grueling perfectionist.

But the results were hard to refute. During the 1920s Chaplin's career blossomed even more. During the decade he made some landmark films, including:

 The Kid (1921)
The Pilgrim (1923)
A Woman in Paris (1923)
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Circus (1928).

Final Years

Nearing the end of his life, Chaplin did make one last visit to the United States in 1972, when he was given an honorary Academy Award. The trip came just five years after Chaplin's final film, A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), the filmmaker's first and only color movie. Despite a cast that included Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, the film did poorly at the box office. In 1975, Chaplin received further recognition when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. In the early morning hours of December 25, 1977, Charlie Chaplin died at his home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. His wife, Oona, and seven of his children were at his bedside at the time of his passing. In a twist that might very well have come out of one of his films, Chaplin's body was stolen not long after he was buried from his grave near Lake Geneva in Switzerland by two men who demanded $400,000 for its return. The men were arrested and Chaplin's body was recovered 11 weeks later.

Bibliography:
http://www.biography.com/people/walt-disney-9275533#disneyland
http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00309.html
http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-chaplin-9244327
http://www.charliechaplin.com/en/biography/articles/21-Overview-of-His-Life