Kurt Russell Shared A Rare Connection With The Legendary Walt Disney
Kurt Russell's first acting gig was in the 1963 Elvis Presley vehicle "It Happened at the World's Fair," wherein he played an unnamed young boy hired to kick Elvis in the shin. Elvis, you see, wanted to romance a nurse at the Fair, and wanted to approach her with an injury as a way of breaking the ice. Russell was 12.
This early gig was parlayed into a successful career as a teen actor, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Russell appeared in multiple high-concept comedies for Disney. He was in three of the Medfield College movies — "Now You See Him, Now You Don't," "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," and "The Strongest Man in the World" — as well as "Superdad," "Charley and the Angel," and "The Barefoot Executive." It wouldn't be until Robert Zemecki's 1980 comedy "Used Cars" that Russell would begin to shed his squeaky-clean teen image and begin appearing in more mature films, R-rated genre fare, and heady adult dramas.
But those early days at Disney were formative for Russell and taught the young actor how to be pragmatic and pliable in the face of studio machinations. It likely helped that he was able to spend so much time with Walt Disney himself. Indeed, Russell recalled his conversations with Uncle Walt in a 1991 article with Entertainment Weekly, written to promote the then-upcoming firefighter drama "Backdraft." Russell said that he was allowed to be totally frank with Disney and that they would play a lot of table tennis. Russell also recalls a deeply moving connection to Walt upon the mogul's death in 1966. It seems that Disney was thinking of Kurt on one of his last days in the office.
Disney's final memo
The EW article pointed out that Walt Disney met Russell when the mogul was 63 and the actor was only 13. Disney knew Russell had the potential to be a massive star, and Russell famously signed a 10-year contract while still in junior high school. For a spell in the 1970s, Russell was Disney's most bankable star. Walt, perhaps understandably, wanted to keep his young star happy, and would communicate with Russell often. Russell recalls a relaxed, affable dude, saying, "We played a lot of Ping-Pong. [...] And we talked a lot. He would ask me what I thought of things, and he knew he was getting a straight answer." Russell was in the rare position of being unfiltered with Walt Disney, and Disney seems to have appreciated it.
Disney died in 1966 at the age of 65, only two weeks after the release of Russell's first Disney feature, Norman Tokar's "Follow Me, Boys!" Disney wasn't going to see the upswing of the young star's popularity. Russell said to EW that, a few years after Disney passed, he was mournfully taken into the man's old office to ponder the man's work. It seems there was a slip of paper on Walt's desk that merely had the words "Kurt Russell" written on it. It was, according to Russell, "the last thing he wrote."
To this day, no one, especially not Russell, knows what Walt was about to write.
But what did it mean?
When asked about the note in a 2017 interview with the Huffington Post, Russell was still unsure as to what it might be connected to. He said:
"They pulled me into the office a couple years after he died, and this woman — who I don't believe it was his secretary, but it might've been, I don't know — pointed to [something he wrote] and she said, 'Do you know what that's about?' And I said, 'No, I don't.' 'Because he wrote something after it. But then he went back up and he wrote your name. That was the last thing he wrote.' And I said, 'Oh gee. I don't know what it's connected to.'"
Russell and Disney did socialize a lot, and Russell was open about their grandfather/grandson-like relationship. Indeed, Russell said that Disney reminded him of his grandfather. Disney would give Russell gifts in the form of Disney background art, and he frequently took the young actor on tours of the animation studio, teaching Russell how his business worked. Walt also told Russell that he might want to stick with acting as a career; the young actor was poised to play professional baseball, as his father, Bing Russell, owned a minor league team.
Russell, now 73, has continued to appear in Disney productions throughout his career. He famously played the villainous narcissist god Ego in James Gunn's 2017 superhero flick "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2," part of the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe. He owes a lot to Walt Disney and was likely happy to be briefly back in the fold.