(I'LL BE ADDING MORE LEGENDS IN TIME)
The first is on Billy Barty
I know what you are saying.... "WHY IS HE A DISNEY LEGEND?"
Well he did the voice of "FIGMENT."
First appearance
1983
Created by Tony Baxter and Steve Kirk
Voiced by
Billy Barty (1981–1998)
Dave Goelz (2002— )
Billy Barty Biography
( 1924 – 2000 )
Actor, comedian. Born William John Bertanzetti on October 25, 1924 in Millsboro, Pennsylvania. Born into a performing family, Billy charmed his way into silent pictures at the age of three. As a child actor, he appeared in such films as Alice in Wonderland, A Midsummer's Night's Dream and The Mickey McGuire Comedies. Though he would never grow taller than 3-feet 9-inches, Billy acted steadily and performed on the vaudeville circuit until he went to college.
Throughout the 1950s, Barty appeared on numerous variety programs, soon becoming America's most popular little person. Adult film roles included Willow, Foul Play, Rumpelstiltskin and Day of the Locust. Though he continued to get minor film and TV roles throughout his life, Billy knew that parts for little people in Hollywood were limited in both number and variety.
In the 1950s, little was understood about Barty's condition - dwarfism. In 1957, he founded the Little People of America Association and hosted the first convention for little people in Reno, Nevada. Through the association and later through his own Billy Barty Foundation, he worked to raise awareness and money for medical research and issues concerning little people, using the motto "Think big."
In December 2000, Barty died of lung and heart failure. He was survived by his wife, Shirley, and their two children, Lori and Braden.
American dwarf actor
(also 1933), and he frequently popped up as a lasciviously leering baby in the risqué musical highlights of
Billy Barty has had a long career in show
big enough to last for six years, when Rooney left the cast for brighter pastures at M-G-M. Barty never missed a beat and just kept creating his own path in show business, this next particular wrinkle finding him playing drums in a vaudeville act with his sisters, traveling the United States and Canada for the next eight years. In 1943, in between the stray movie role and honing his new nightclub solo act, Billy was attending Los Angeles City College. He went at academia with the same kind of determination that he went at show business, managing to both fully participate in intramural sports, but also hold down a major in journalism as well.In the meantime, his nightclub act was starting to kick up some noise and Billy was regularly employed throughout the late ’40s into the early ’50s. Barty was a one-man show; he played a brash Gene Krupa style of ‘hot jazz’ drumming, blew a little trumpet, sang, danced, and did some impressions. This much talent couldn’t go unnoticed by someone who was in a position to showcase it for too long and that person of position turned out to be bandleader Spike Jones. Jones hired Barty as a specialty act in 1953, replacing fellow short stature performer Frankie Little.
Jones ended up getting much more than he bargained for in this versatile performer. He proved to be an immediate hit, connecting big when Spike started his television show the following year. Best of all was his outrageous impression of Liberace doing “I’m in the Mood for Love, ” which would become a hit for the bandleader simply by recording Billy’s stage routine. “Spike and I hit it off right at the beginning, ” Barty has reminisced, “He knew I wasn’t a yes man; he knew I was my own boss. And he accepted me for just being me. Spike wanted me to sell programs. He said, ‘That’s how Frankie Little made his money.’ I said, ‘That’s good for Frankie. I’ll make my money entertaining.’ I think that’s what sold me to Spike; I was honest and frank right in the beginning.” Billy would stay with Jones into the late 50s, until the bandleader’s health began to decline due to emphysema, making touring a dodgy proposition at best. It was time to go back and start picking up some movie and tv work, perhaps.By his own estimate, Billy has made appearances in over 200 films, including some early Mack Sennett sound shorts with Gold Diggers of 1933, Roman Scandals, The Parade, Nothing Sacred, Alice In Wonderland, Footlight Parade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bride of Frankenstein numbering among his early credits. His post-1960s film work is plentiful and rewarding, including W.C. Fields and Me, Foul Play, Rabbit Test, Hardly Working, Under The Rainbow, Tough Guys, Life Stinks, The Happy Hooker Goes To Washington, Firepower, True Confessions, UHF, Legends, and Tough Guys to add to his numerous credits. Of particular merit is his fine dramatic turn in Day of the Locust. He scored equally big on the small screen as well. He hosted a successful children’s TV program from 1963 to 1967 as well as doing superb guest turns on Circus Boy, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Phyllis, and Little House on the Prairie.In 1957, while he was working in Reno, Nevada with Spike, Billy organized the Little People of America, a non-profit organization. This later dovetailed into the establishment of the Billy Barty Foundation, doing marvelous work to heighten awareness about-and come to the aid of-persons of small stature. Some of this spirit is perhaps best exemplified in the documentary that Barty also appears in, Being Different. A little man with a big heart, some would say. Certainly proof positive that good things do, indeed, come in small packages.business, spanning some 70 years of work in movies, nightclubs, theater and television. All the more amazing because Barty is a 3-foot-11, 86 pound midget. While most height challenged actors were lucky to find less than occasional work in Hollywood in the role as a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz or in a novelty Western like The Terror of Tiny Town, Billy Barty kept working in every medium available to him, ultimately becoming the most well known performer of his kind. Talent will out, indeed.He was born William John Barty in Millsboro, Pennsylvania on October 25 in 1919, although other birth dates and years have popped up in various biographies with October 24, 1923 being the most common. The youngster was already near to his eventual height and weight when he started working as a child actor in Hollywood in the mid to late 1920s, making his movie debut at age three in a Vitaphone two reeler entitled Wedded Blisters. After being turned down by producer Hal Roach when he auditioned for the Our Gang two reel comedies, Barty became a regular fixture in the rival Mickey McGuire series, starring a young Mickey Rooney in the title role. The competing series was the only one to last in the sound era, with Barty playing McGuire’s kid brother. Child actress Shirley Jean Rickert, herself a member of the Our Gang series, jumped ship in 1931 to join up with the McGuire cast. She recalls her audition for the series vividly. Her parents drove her over to the Darmour studios and while Dad waited out in the car, she and her Mother walked inside. There they encountered Billy Barty, made up as a baby for a scene. Barty jumped out of the baby carriage, lit up a cigar, and did some hand springs in front of them. Shirley Jean’s Mom grabbed her and went back to the car and told her husband, “There’s a baby in there doing cartwheels-my child can’t do things like that.” The upshot of the story is that Dad talked Mom out of leaving, they went back inside, and little Shirley Jean was cast alongside Billy as Tomboy Taylor. Although neither as innovative or as popular as the Our Gang comedies, the series was Billy Barty always claimed to have been born in the early '20s, but the evidence of his somewhat wizened, all-knowing countenance in his film appearances of the 1930s would suggest that he was at least ten years shy of the whole truth. At any rate, Barty made many film appearances from at least 1931 onward, most often cast as bratty children due to his height. He was a peripheral member of an Our Gang rip-off in the Mickey McGuire comedy shorts, portrayed the infant-turned-pig in Alice in Wonderland (1933), he did a turn in blackface as a "shrunken" Eddie Cantor in Roman Scandals Busby Berkeley's Warner Bros. films. One of Barty's most celebrated cinema moments occurred in 1937's Nothing Sacred, in which, playing a small boy, he pops up out of nowhere to bite Fredric March in the leg. Barty was busy but virtually anonymous in films, since he seldom received screen credit. TV audiences began to connect his name with his face in the 1950s when Barty was featured on various variety series hosted by bandleader Spike Jones. Disdainful of certain professional "little people" who rely on size alone to get laughs, Barty was seen at his very best on the Jones programs, dancing, singing, and delivering dead-on impressions: the diminutive actor's takeoff on Liberace was almost unbearably funny. Though he was willing to poke fun at himself on camera, Barty was fiercely opposed to TV and film producers who exploited midgets and dwarves, and as he continued his career into the 1970s and '80s, Barty saw to it that his own roles were devoid of patronization -- in fact, he often secured parts that could have been portrayed by so-called "normal" actors, proof that one's stature has little to do with one's talent. A two-fisted advocate of equitable treatment of short actors, Billy Barty took time away from his many roles in movies (Foul Play [1978], Willow [1988]) and TV to maintain his support organization The Little People of America and the Billy Barty Foundation. Billy Barty died in December 2000 of heart failure. Journey Into Imagination,Billy Barty (1981–1998) Dave Goelz (2002— )
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