Darlene Gillespie | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Darlene Faye Gillespie April 8, 1941 |
| Other names | Darlene Valentine |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1955–1962 |
| Spouse | Jerry Fraschilla (m. 1999;died 2008) |
| Relatives | Gina Gillespie (sister) |
Darlene Faye Gillespie (born April 8, 1941) is a Canadian-American former child actress, most remembered as a singer and dancer on the original The Mickey Mouse Club television series from 1955 to 1959. After her career in entertainment ended, she became a nurse.
 | This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(November 2018) |
Gillespie was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Her Irish father and French Canadian mother were a former vaudeville dance team. [1] When Darlene was two years old, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September 1956 at the age of fifteen.
Her sister Gina Gillespie was a child actress in television and films who eventually became a lawyer.
At age ten, Gillespie started singing lessons with Glen Raikes, and took dance lessons with Burch Mann , founder of the American Folk Ballet Company.
Darlene Gillespie auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club in March 1955. She originally auditioned as a dancer, but she sung "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and was hired. [2] She was the leading female singer of the Mouseketeers (opposite the leading male singer Tommy Cole), and appeared on the program for all three seasons of its original run.
As a Mouseketeer, Gillespie was described as being "a vibrant, freckle-faced youngster with more bounce to the ounce than a bottle of soda pop". [3] She was known for her singing talents, dancing, comedy sketches, and her country-inspired singing performances.
In the first season, she starred in the serial Corky and White Shadow (1956) with Buddy Ebsen and Lloyd Corrigan. [4] The 17-episode serial introduced Gillespie as the female teenage heroine Corky Brady, accompanied by a white German Shepard. A number of songs were incorporated into the plot to showcase young Gillespie's singing talents, most notably "My Pa" and "Uncle Dan". [3]
The second season opened with The Amusement Park showpiece, featuring Gillespie and Bobby Burgess. It was considered a surprise for touching on teen romance and even more so for celebrating a non-Disney amusement park. [5] During the second season of the show, Gillespie shared a Talent Round-Up Day with her three sisters, and was also given her own special feature in the Fun With Music Day episodes Day's End and An Evening with Darlene. [6] However throughout the second season, Mouseketeer Annette Funicello was becoming a rising star, promoted by Walt Disney himself, which shifted the viewer's attention from Gillespie to Funicello by 1958.
The third season opened with The Pet Shop showpiece, featuring Gillespie with Lonnie Burr, Bobby Burgess, and Tommy Cole. [7] In the Fun With Music Day episode Blind Date, Gillespie stars in a comedic role as a Geeky teenager waiting for her date. [8] During the third season, Gillespie appeared in the serial The New Adventures of Spin and Marty (1957) with Tim Considine and David Stollery, and was cast in a secondary role as Annette's friend. [9]
The serial Annette (1958) was meant to star Gillespie in a co-leading role, originally titled Annette and Darlene. However, for reasons unknown, Gillespie was recast and replaced by Judy Nugent as Annette's friend Jet. [6] Her career with Disney was known to be sabotaged by her father and herself.
In 1957, Gillespie was cast as Dorothy Gale in a musical number from the proposed live-action Disney film The Rainbow Road to Oz on an episode of the Disneyland television series in September 1957. The movie was never made.
After The Mickey Mouse Club stopped filming in 1959, and her contract with Disney was not renewed, Gillespie's short acting career neared its end. Her last television appearance was as Beth Brian in the 1962 episode "The Star" of the NBC family drama series National Velvet starring Lori Martin as a budding thoroughbred rider.
Following The Mickey Mouse Club, Gillespie finished high school at Providence High in Burbank. She later graduated from University with a nursing degree, specializing in heart surgery. [3]
Gillespie made many recordings under various Disney labels, including an album of 1950s rock and roll standards, Darlene of the Teens (1957). [2] For the album, she recorded songs with The Mellomen such as "Teenage Crush", "Don't Forbid Me", "Butterfly", "Too Much" and "Sittin' in the Balcony". [10] She also did a noteworthy rendition of Elvis' "Love Me Tender". [2]
In 1956, Gillespie and Tommy Cole, the two leading singers of The Mickey Mouse Club, released a single "I Am Not Now and Never Have Been in Love" and "Do Mi So". [10]
Gillespie recorded albums for Disney animated films, in which she sang and narrated stories such as Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty . Many of Gillespie's recordings sold for decades, a testimony to her remarkable singing voice and talents. [2]
She also sang the songs "Valentine Greetings" and "My Pa", a song that she sang in Corky and White Shadow, from the album "Happy Birthday and Other Holiday Songs".
In 1973, attempting to revive her singing career, Gillespie formed her own record company Alva Records. She released a 45 rpm record of country songs under the name Darlene Valentine. [6]
When Annette Funicello became a singing and acting star, Darlene became very jealous as a youth and an adult. She did not want to be in the same room as Funicello at Mouseketeer reunions.
In the late 1980s, Gillespie began a legal battle against Disney and the Screen Actors Guid for royalties and residual payments for record sales and reruns of The Mickey Mouse Club. Gillespie had previously sustained a back injury from a fall that ended her medical career as a nurse. This legal battle strained her relationship with her former Mouseketeers castmates. [6]
She was banned from participating in the 40th anniversary Mickey Mouse Club documentary because of her criticisms of Disney and Funicello.
In 1997, she was charged with petty theft for helping her then-fiancé Jerry Fraschilla shoplift four women's shirts. She was found guilty and sentenced to three days in jail and three years' probation. Gillespie, then 56 years old, denied the charges and filed preliminary papers to appeal. The disposition is unclear. [11]
In December 1998, she was convicted in federal court of aiding her third husband, Fraschilla, to purchase securities using a check-kiting scheme. [12] She was sentenced to two years in prison, [13] but was released after serving only three months.
In 2005, she and her husband were indicted on federal charges of filing multiple fraudulent claims in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit. The charges have since been dropped. Fraschilla died in 2008. [14]
The Mickey Mouse Club is an American variety television show that aired intermittently from 1955 to 1996 and returned to social media in 2017. Created by Walt Disney and produced by Walt Disney Productions, the program was first televised for four seasons, from 1955 to 1959, by ABC. This original run featured a regular, but ever-changing cast of mostly teen performers. ABC broadcast reruns weekday afternoons during the 1958–1959 season, airing right after American Bandstand. The show was revived three times after its initial 1955–1959 run on ABC, first from 1977 to 1979 for first-run syndication as The New Mickey Mouse Club, then from 1989 to 1996 as The All-New Mickey Mouse Club airing on The Disney Channel, and again from 2017 to 2018 with the moniker Club Mickey Mouse airing on internet social media.
Annette Joanne Funicello was an American actress and singer. Funicello began her professional career as a child performer at the age of twelve. She was one of the most popular Mouseketeers on the original Mickey Mouse Club. In her teenage years, she recorded under the name Annette, and had a successful career as a pop singer. Her most notable singles are "O Dio Mio", "First Name Initial", "Tall Paul", and "Pineapple Princess". During the mid-1960s, she established herself as a film actress, popularizing the successful "Beach Party" genre alongside co-star Frankie Avalon.
Thomas Lee Kirk was an American actor, best known for his performances in films made by Walt Disney Studios such as Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, The Absent-Minded Professor, and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, as well as the beach-party films of the mid-1960s. He frequently appeared as a love interest for Annette Funicello or as part of a family with Kevin Corcoran as his younger brother and Fred MacMurray as his father.
Walt Disney Records is an American record label of the Disney Music Group. The label releases soundtrack albums from The Walt Disney Company's motion picture studios, television series, theme parks, and traditional studio albums produced by its roster of pop, teen pop, and country artists.
William Crozier Walsh was a film producer, screenwriter and comics writer who primarily worked on live-action films for Walt Disney Productions. He was born in New York City. For his work on Mary Poppins, he shared Academy Award nominations for Best Picture with Walt Disney, and for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium with Don DaGradi. He also wrote the Mickey Mouse comic strip for more than two decades.
James Wesley Dodd was an American actor, singer and songwriter best known as the master of ceremonies for the popular 1950s Walt Disney television series The Mickey Mouse Club, as well as the writer of its well-known theme song "The Mickey Mouse Club March." A different version of this march, much slower in tempo and with different lyrics, became the alma mater that closed each episode.
The Monkey's Uncle is a 1965 American comedy film starring Tommy Kirk as genius college student Merlin Jones and Annette Funicello as his girlfriend, Jennifer. The title plays on the idiom "monkey's uncle" and refers to a chimpanzee named Stanley, Merlin's legal "nephew" who otherwise has little relevance to the plot. Jones invents a man-powered airplane and a sleep-learning system. The film is a sequel to 1964's The Misadventures of Merlin Jones.
Timothy Daniel Considine was an American actor, writer, photographer, and automotive historian. He was best known for his acting roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Spin and Marty is a series of television shorts that aired as part of The Mickey Mouse Club show of the mid-1950s, produced by Walt Disney and broadcast on the ABC network in the United States. There were three serials in all, set at the Triple R Ranch, a boys' western-style summer camp. The first series of 25 eleven-minute episodes, The Adventures of Spin and Marty, was filmed in 1955. Its popularity led to two sequels — The Further Adventures of Spin and Marty in 1956 and The New Adventures of Spin and Marty in 1957.
Doreen Isabelle Tracey was a British-born American performer who appeared on the original Mickey Mouse Club television show from 1955 to 1959.
Kevin Anthony "Moochie" Corcoran was an American child actor, director and producer. He appeared in numerous Disney projects between 1957 and 1963, leading him to be honored as a Disney Legend in 2006. His nickname, Moochie, established him as an irrepressible character in film.
The Mouse Factory is an American syndicated television series produced by Walt Disney Productions and created by Ward Kimball, that ran from 1972 to 1973. It showed clips from various Disney cartoons and movies, hosted by celebrity guests, including Charles Nelson Reilly, JoAnne Worley, Wally Cox, Johnny Brown, Phyllis Diller, Joe Flynn, Annette Funicello, Shari Lewis and Hush Puppy, Lamb Chop, Dom DeLuise, Don Knotts and many more visiting the Mouse Factory and interacting with the walk-around Disney characters from the Disney theme parks. The series was later rerun on the Disney Channel in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Tall Paul" is a song recorded by Annette Funicello and written by the Sherman Brothers, along with Bob Roberts.
Sharon Baird is an American actress, voice actress, singer, dancer and puppeteer who is best known for having been a Mouseketeer.
Walt Disney Presents: Annette is a television serial that ran on The Mickey Mouse Club during the show's third season (1957–1958). It starred Annette Funicello as Annette McCleod, a poor, orphaned country girl who moves into town with her upper-class Uncle Archie and Aunt Lila. The serial also starred Richard Deacon as Archie McCleod, Sylvia Field as Archie's sister Lila McCleod, Mary Wickes as Katie the housekeeper and prolific Disney child stars Tim Considine, David Stollery and Roberta Shore as Annette's friends. The story was adapted by Lillie Hayward from the book Margaret by Janette Sebring Lowrey.
Lonnie Burr is an American actor, entertainer and writer best known as one of nine of the original thirty-nine Mouseketeers who remained under a seven-year contract for the complete filming (1955–1959) of Walt Disney’s children’s television show the Mickey Mouse Club. The Mickey Mouse Club was the first national TV show to star children who appeared primarily as themselves as well as acting as characters in scenes and musical numbers. The original show aired in syndication in the 1960s, reran again in 1975, then on the Disney Channel in the 1980s through the early 2000s.
Carl Patrick "Cubby" O'Brien, better known by his nickname Cubby, is an American drummer and former child actor. He is known as one of the original Mouseketeers on the weekday ABC television program The Mickey Mouse Club from 1955 to 1958.
The Rainbow Road to Oz was a proposed, but never finished, Walt Disney Studios 1950s live-action film about characters in the Land of Oz. Inspired by L. Frank Baum's early 20th century Oz novels, it was to have starred some of the Mouseketeers, including Darlene Gillespie as Dorothy Gale and Annette Funicello as Princess Ozma, as well as Bobby Burgess as the Scarecrow, Doreen Tracey as the Patchwork Girl, Jimmie Dodd as the Cowardly Lion, Tommy Kirk as the villainous son of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Kevin Corcoran.
Adventure in Dairyland is a television serial that aired in 1956 on ABC as part of the second season of The Mickey Mouse Club. The serial starred Mouseketeer Annette Funicello and Sammy Ogg of Spin and Marty and featured Kevin Corcoran in his first Walt Disney production.
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