Bobby Driscoll

BOBBY DRISCOLL d1968. American child actor known for a large body of cinema and TV performances from 1943 to 1960. He starred in some of the Walt Disney Studios most popular live-action pictures of that period including ; Song of The South (1946) / So Dear to My Heart (1948) and Treasure Island (1950). He was cast as Jim Hawkins in "Treasure Island" with Robert Newton which was filmed in the UK in 1950. During production it was discovered that Bobby Driscoll did not have a valid British work permit, so his family and Disney were fined and ordered to leave the country. They were allowed to remain for six weeks to prepare an appeal, during which director Byron Haskin hastily shot all of his close-ups. Then he used his British stand-in to film missing location scenes after he and his parents had returned to California. His work in this film earned Bobby Driscoll a star at 1560 Vine Street on the Hollywood Walk of fame. He served as the animation model and provided the voice for the title role in Peter Pan (1953). In 1950, he received an Academy Juvenile Award for outstanding performance in feature films. During the mid-1950s, his acting career began to decline and he turned primarily to guest appearances on anthology TV series. He became addicted to narcotics and was sentenced in 1961 to a year in prison at the Narcotic Rehab Centre in California. He was released in early 1962, but was unable to find acting work and later attempts to revive his career on the stage were unsuccessful. He focused his attention on the avant-garde art scene at Andy Warhols Greenwich "Factory" community with some of his work at the time considered outstanding. In early 1968, the now penniless Driscoll left The Factory and disappeared into Manhattan's underground. On March 30th 1968 (about three weeks after his 31st birthday) two little boys playing in a deserted East Village tenement (at 371 East 10th St) found his body lying on a cot with two empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets scattered on the ground. The medical examination determined that he had died from heart failure caused by his longtime drug abuse. There was no identification on the body and photos taken of it and shown around the neighborhood yielded no positive identification. When his body went unclaimed, he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in New York City's Potters Field on Hart Island. Late in 1969, around nineteen months after his death, his mother sought the help of officials at the Disney Studios to contact him for a hoped-for reunion with his father, who was nearing death. This resulted in a fingerprint match at NYPD which then located his burial site on Hart Island.