Walt Disney is the multiple award-winning American film producer, writer, animator, entrepreneur and screenwriter who created theWalt Disney Company.

He died on 15 December, 1966.

He created some of the world’s best-loved characters, including Mickey Mouse.

He received 22 Academy Awards and 48 nominations during his lifetime.

Born Walter Elias Disney on 5 December, 1901, he grew up in Chicago, USA, but moved to Missouri at the age of five. He developed his love for drawing and a move back to Chicago in 1917 saw him attend night courses at the Chicago Art Institute.

After a brief stint with the Red Cross, during which time he drove an ambulance in France, Mr Disney moved to Kansas City to begin his career as an artist. His first job, at the ‘Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio’, saw him design adverts for newspapers, magazines and movie theatres. It was also where he first met a shy but talented cartoonist named Ub Iwerks, with whom he would later come to form the short-lived company ‘Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists’.

With the dawn of the 1920s, he arrived in Los Angeles. On him, it is widely believed he had only $40 in his pocket and an unfinished cartoon in his suitcase. His first studio was a garage in his uncle’s house, from where he sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler who promptly wrote back with a request for some animated shorts.

Encouraged, but aware of his poor financial situation, he asked his brother Roy for help. Roy agreed and Mr Disney immediately invited Mr Iwerks to Hollywood where, on Hyperion Avenue in 1923, the Disney Brother’s Cartoon Studio was born.

Its first production was the so-called ‘Alice Comedies’ which achieved reasonable success. In 1927 the Disney studio expanded and Mr Disney himself hired a soon-to-be legendary team of animators including Friz Freleng , Rudolf Ising and Hugh Harman.

However, there was also another, rather more famous addition to the team during this time, a character purportedly designed by Mr Iwerks which took the world by storm in the groundbreaking Steamboat Willie cartoon. His name was Mickey Mouse and, with the demise of ‘Felix the Cat’ in 1930, he quickly became the world’s new favourite animation character.

Despite a brief split from Mr Iwerks during the early 1930s, the Mickey Mouse cartoons successfully moved into colour in 1935 and soon launched spin-off series for popular supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. Meanwhile, Mr Disney began production on the world’s first animated feature in English and Technicolor, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which, at its premier in 1938, met with a standing ovation. It went on to become the most successful picture of that year and allowed his company to build a new campus for Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, where feature animation staff worked on future blockbusters such as Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi.

The outbreak of World War Two saw the studio hit a brief low patch, with the now critically-acclaimed Pinocchio and Bambi both underperforming in theatres. However, by the late 1940s, Disney was back on top with Peter Pan and his most successful film since Snow White, Cinderella.

The studio soon began to branch out into live-action features and was one of the first to take full advantage of the then-new medium of television, producing its first TV special One Hour in Wonderland in 1950. It was also instrumental in promoting Disneyland, a Disney-themed amusement park which first opened in 1955. An immediate success, it attracted visitors from all over the world.

Mr Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1966 and, 10 days after his 65th birthday, suffered a heart attack. He died on 15 December, 1966, in a hospital within sight of the Disney Studio lot.

After his brother’s death, Roy Disney came out of retirement to take full control of Walt Disney Productions and opened the Walt Disney World Resort later that year.

In 1964 he was one of several American’s chosen by President Lyndon Johnson to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and received the premier order of France, Legion d’Honneur in 1935.

“I’m not interested in pleasing the critics,” he once famously remarked. “I’ll take my chances pleasing the audiences.”