Featured Image Credit: Disney
Topics: Disney, Reddit, Film and TV
Gerrard Kaonga
The story of child star Bobby Driscoll is breaking hearts online as people discover what happened to the voice actor for Peter Pan.
It seems not all Disney stories have a happy ending.
Reddit users have been stunned after learning of the fate of Driscoll, the child star who voiced the boy who never grew up in the 1953 flick.
In the TodayIlearned subreddit, a post giving a quick breakdown of Driscoll’s life after he parted ways with Disney has been upvoted more than 11,000 times and seen a slew of concerned comments from fans of the film.
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Prior to voicing Peter Pan, Driscoll had starred in some of Disney’s best known live action films of the late 1940s, including 1946’s Song of the South, 1949’s So Dear to My Heart as well as 1950’s Treasure Island.
Driscoll was also well liked by company head Walt Disney, who saw ‘Driscoll with great affection as the living embodiment of his own youth’, according to voice actor Marc Elliot, who wrote a biography on Walt.
Not long after Peter Pan had its theatric release, however, Driscoll’s extension with the company was cancelled.
The break was devastating from the actor, who ended up moving to New York City to take acting classes in an attempt to forge out a new life for himself after the huge blow.
Life for Driscoll only got more difficult following this, however, as the young actor quickly drifted into drugs and struggled to get roles.
He had attempted to reinvent himself in order to gain new acting roles but only managed to scrape a few roles here and there.
He eventually died at the age of 31 from drug abuse and was found in an abandoned building in New York.
Due to not having an ID on him, his unclaimed body was buried in an unmarked grave and his death was not widely reported on until years later.
In fact, not only did news of his death only surface in the press four years later, his own mother - who had not heard anything from him in years - only learned about it nearly a year and a half later.
Reddit users couldn’t believe there was such a dark ending for someone connected to one of their most beloved stories.
“Just a heartbreaking story,” one user wrote.
"That's just horrible," echoed another.
“It really seems fame is just terrible. I could not imagine being a famous person and then just having all that work dry up,” someone else commented.
“Well thats very upsetting. Thank you,” another wrote.