Bobby Driscoll was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated child actors, voicing Peter Pan for Disney and winning a special Academy Award for his work in the late 1940s. Yet within a decade of reaching stardom, his career collapsed, and he descended into addiction and homelessness. When he died in 1968 at age 31, his body went unidentified for days, and he was buried in a mass grave alongside more than a million other unclaimed people. Born Robert Cletus Driscoll on March 3, 1937, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was the only child of Cletus Driscoll, an insulation salesman, and his wife, a former teacher.
The family moved to Los Angeles after a doctor advised that the father relocate to California due to breathing problems linked to asbestos exposure on the job. Driscoll’s entry into acting came almost by accident. He landed his first role at MGM in the 1943 family drama Lost Angel, delivering a brief two-minute performance that helped secure him a more significant part the following year as young Al Sullivan in The Fighting Sullivans. Throughout the 1940s, he appeared in films such as Sunday Dinner for a Soldier, The Big Bonanza, and So Goes My Love, before being signed to a contract with Walt Disney Studios.
He quickly became one of Disney’s most popular child performers. His best-known Disney roles included the 1946 film Song of the South, based on the Uncle Remus stories, as well as So Dear to My Heart and Treasure Island. He also provided the voice of the title character in Disney’s animated classic Peter Pan, released in 1953. In 1950, Driscoll received an Academy Juvenile Award for his performances in So Dear to My Heart and The Window, placing him among the most promising young actors in the industry.
Song of the South has since been criticized for its portrayal of plantation life in the Reconstruction-era South, and the film has never been released on home media in the United States. Driscoll’s career began to decline in the early 1950s as he reached adolescence and his physical appearance changed. He also developed a drug addiction. In 1953, Disney terminated his contract.
He continued acting in smaller film and television roles, including appearances on Dragnet and Rawhide, but he never regained the level of success he had achieved as a child star. In 1956, he married Marilyn Jean Rush. The couple had three children and divorced in 1960. By the 1960s, Driscoll’s life had spiraled out of control.
He became homeless and was arrested several times for petty crimes. In 1965, he moved to New York hoping to rebuild his career on the Broadway stage, but the effort did not succeed. During his time in New York, he became part of Andy Warhol’s Greenwich Village art community, known as the Factory, where he began focusing on his artwork. Some of his pieces were considered impressive, and a few of his surviving collages and cardboard mailers were later exhibited in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
On March 30, 1968, two boys playing in an abandoned East Village tenement found Driscoll’s body lying on a cot. Empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets were scattered on the ground around him. A postmortem examination determined he had died of heart failure brought on by his drug abuse. He was 31 years old.
No identification was found on his body, and photographs shown around the neighborhood failed to produce a positive identification. His body was never claimed, and he was buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island in New York City, where more than one million people are interred. The exact number of people buried on Hart Island remains unknown due to poor recordkeeping, and burial records from 1961 to 1977 were destroyed in a fire. In late 1969, Driscoll’s mother sought help from officials at Disney Studios in an effort to contact him, hoping for a reunion with his father, who was nearing death.
That request led to a fingerprint match at the New York City Police Department, confirming Driscoll’s burial on Hart Island. Although his name appears on his father’s gravestone at Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Oceanside, California, Driscoll’s remains are still on Hart Island. In 1971, reporters researching the whereabouts of the star during the re-release of Song of the South finally reported his death. Driscoll was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008.
His story has often been cited as a cautionary example of the dangers of child stardom and a reminder of the need for support systems for young performers struggling with addiction and mental health problems.
