The original Peter Pan voice actor Bobby Driscoll’s tragic death has haunted fans of the Disney fairytale for decades.
Bobby lent his voice to the young Peter back in 1953, following the story of young Wendy and her brothers who are whisked away to Neverland.
Bobby had a whole host of other roles in various kids’ movies, playing Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island and played Johnny in the very controversial 1946 flick Song of the South.
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But just over a decade after he found fame as Peter Pan, Bobby was sadly discovered dead by a group of children playing in an abandoned housing block in Greenwich Village, New York City.
(Image: Getty Images)
The children found Bobby lying dead on a cot in 1968, surrounded by empty beer bottles and religious leaflets – with no signs of foul play.
A horrific end to a lustrous career, police couldn’t locate his next of kin or find anyone to claim the body. His cause of death was officially listed as a hardening of the arteries – a side effect of long-term heroin abuse.
He was buried in a mass grave for paupers on Hart Island in the Bronx alongside a group of others who had similarly fallen on hard times.
To this day, the young actor’s body remains in that mass grave. He was just 31 years old when he died.
(Image: Popperfoto via Getty Images)
The island itself has a tragic history. It has previously been home to a women’s asylum, a men’s prison and a quarantine home for an outbreak of yellow fever in the 1870s.
Actor Billy Gray, who was pals with Bobby, admitted that he never “really recovered from being abandoned by Hollywood.”
He explained: “It hit him hard. He was a heroin addict. It was tragic and there wasn’t much you could do about it. He was strong, he had a good intellect and he should have known better. But that was a choice he made, and you couldn’t talk him out of it.”
Bobby – who was only 16 when he voiced Peter Pan – lost his impish face as he grew older, growing out of the traditional Disney image. In 1953 he was dropped by the studio.
(Image: LMPC via Getty Images)
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Gray said: “I heard that he was informed that he was no longer under contract through them by driving up to the entrance and being refused entrance into the studio. That was his notification that he was no longer needed there.”
Eventually, Bobby was arrested several times for charges including drug possession, burglary and assault, and was sentenced to spend time behind bars at Chino Men’s Prison in 1961.
That left him unable to get any more acting work – after making around $50,000 a year as a jobbing actor before that.
Bobby Driscoll’s mother said of his tragic death: “Our minister had a theory. He said later that Bobby just didn’t want to be a ‘good little boy’ anymore. He’d been too good. He wanted to be just the reverse. Maybe that was it.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
