Robert Cletus Driscoll (March 3, 1937 – circa March 30, 1968) was an American actor.
He starred in a number of films for Walt Disney Pictures during his childhood from 1940s to the early 1950s, including Song of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1948), and Treasure Island (1950). He received a Academy Juvenile Award in 1950 for outstanding performances in So Dear to My Heart and RKO Pictures' The Window (1949). He also served as both reference model and voice actor in Disney's animated classic Peter Pan (1953). He also performed on radio from 1948 to 1957, and was awarded a Milky Way Gold Star Award in 1954 for his radio work.
His career began to decline as he aged out of adolescence, during which he had severe acne, forcing him to wear heavy amounts of makeup to cover it for his television appearances. In March 1953, just weeks after Peter Pan's theatrical release, Disney cancelled their two-year extension to Driscoll's contact and terminated his connection. Despite that, he was unable to shake off the label of being "Disney's kid actor" in Hollywood, which negatively affected him. He was mostly confined to TV work, mainly anthology and drama shows, for the next three years. After Driscoll left Disney, his parents changed his school from the Hollywood Professional School to the public University High School in West Los Angeles, at which his grades dropped and his former Disney affiliation led to him being bullied, causing the start of his infamous drug abuse. His parents allowed him to return to his old school the following year, and he graduated in 1955.
He then began using the name "Robert Driscoll" to distance himself from his child star days, but work in Hollywood dried up; he only starred in two more feature films, The Scarlet Coat (1955) and The Party Crashers (1958), although he did receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his past film work. His last known TV roles were small roles in two one-season series, The Best of the Post, a syndicated anthology series adapting stories published in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Brothers Brannagan, a low-budget crime drama that starred Stephen Dunne and Mark Roberts; both of these appearances aired on November 5, 1960. Driscoll was then imprisoned in late 1961 for his drug addiction and was unable to find any more acting work after he was paroled in early 1962.
He relocated to New York City in 1965 in an unsuccessful attempt to revive his acting career on Broadway. He joined Andy Warhol's art community the Factory to hone his artistic talents, under the mentorship of artist and poet Wallace Berman.
Driscoll made his final known appearance in any film in experimental filmmaker Piero Heliczer's underground film Dirt (1965).
He died in poverty sometime around March 1968, lying alone in a cot in a vacant East Village tenement. His body was found by two boys playing in the tenement on March 30, but he wasn't identified then, and his body was buried unclaimed in a potter's field on Hart Island. It wasn't until late 1969, when his mother Isabelle attempted to locate him to try to reunite him with his dying father Cletus, that the New York City Police Department determined through fingerprint matching that Driscoll was buried on Hart Island; Driscoll's remains are still there to this day.
See his Wikipedia article for more details on his life.
Selected filmography (films and television only):
- Lost Angel (1943): Bobby, Boy on Train with Sucker (uncredited)
- The Fighting Sullivans (1944): Al Sullivan as a child (uncredited)
- Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944): Jeep Osborne
- The Big Bonanza (1944): Spud Kilton
- Identity Unknown (1945): Toddy Loring
- From This Day Forward (1946): Billy Beesley
- So Goes My Lovenote (1946): Percy Maxim
- O.S.S. (1946): Gerard
- Song of the South (1946): Johnny
- Melody Time (1948): Himself
- So Dear to My Heart (1948): Jeremiah Kincaid (Academy Juvenile Award for 1949)
- The Window (1949): Tommy Woodry (Academy Juvenile Award for 1949)
- Treasure Island (1950): Jim Hawkins
- When I Grow Up (1951): Josh / Danny Reed
- Father's Lion (1952): Goofy Jr. (voice)
- The Happy Time (1952): Robert "Bibi" Bonnard
- Peter Pan (1953): Peter Pan (voice and close-up model)
- The Loretta Young Show (1954): Jim ("Big Jim")
- The Scarlet Coat (1955): Ben Potter
- Climax! (1956): Gary ("The Secret of River Lane")
- The Silent Service (1957): Fletcher ("S01, E15, The Ordeal of the S-38")
- Frontier Justice (1958): Trumpeter Jones ("Death Watch")
- The Party Crashers (1958): Josh Bickford
- The Millionaire (1958): Lew Conover ("The Norman Conover Story")
- Trackdown (1959): Mike Hardesty ("Blind Alley")
- Rawhide (1959–1960): Will Mason ("Incident of Fear in the Streets"), Billy Chance ("Incident of the Captive")
- Dirt (1965): Unknown (final film role)
- Once Upon a Studio (2023): Peter Pan (voice; archive audio)
