Anette funicellos education biography
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Annette Funicello, original Mouseketeer, dies at 70
Annette Funicello, arguably the most famous Disney Mousketeer of all, died Monday in Los Angeles from complications from multiple sclerosis.
Funicello was born in 1942 in Utica, N.Y., to Italian-American parents. She moved to Southern California with her family at age 4. She sang, danced and modeled and was discovered at the age of 12 by Walt Disney when he saw her perform. He invited her to audition for his new television show for children, "The Mickey Mouse Club."
When the show debuted, I was 4 years old, and my family was living in San Diego. My parents could never afford to take us kids to Disneyland, but we had the Mouseketeer hats and would put them on and gather around the television whenever the show was on. I remember the excitement! And I remember Annette Funicello through her singing and her film career, especially "The Shaggy Dog" and the "Beach Party" movies -- though my mother would
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‘America’s sweetheart’
If you were a girl in the 1950s, Annette Funicello was the ideal of feminine goodness, your fantasy best friend forever. If you were a boy, she was your dream date, demure, doe-eyed and just different enough to set hearts pounding.
The most adored of Walt Disney’s original 24 Mouseketeers, Funicello later exchanged her mouse ears for a swimsuit in a series of 1960s beach movies, but she remained a reassuring figure, fun-loving yet chaste in an era of rapidly shifting social values.
“She had a heart and a soul and a feeling about her that everybody just connected to -- male or female -- without being pretentious in any way,” Frankie Avalon, her co-star in movies such as “Beach Party” and “Beach Blanket Bingo,” said Monday. “She was just a nice, nice girl next door ... America’s sweetheart.”
Funicello, the dark-haired älskling of “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the 1950s, died Monday from complications of multiple sclerosis at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfie
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Mouseketeer Annette Funicello won people’s hearts with her shy yet friendly smile, and by the end of the first season of the Mickey Mouse Club, her fan mail had ballooned to 6,000 letters a month.
Annette recalled Walt Disney’s response to her phenomenal success: “I was about 13 and the fan mail started coming in and he said to me, ‘Do you have lots of Italian relatives?’ ‘No, why?’ I replied. ‘The amount of mail for you is incredible!’”
Born in Utica, New York, on October 22, 1942, Annette was four when her family moved to Los Angeles. The next year, her mother enrolled her in dance lessons, to help Annette overcome her shy nature.
In 1955, at the age of 12, she performed the lead role in Swan Lake at the Burbank Starlight Bowl. Little did she know at the time, Walt Disney was sitting in the audience; he was there scouting children for his new television show, the Mickey Mouse Club. The next day, Annette’s