Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
Big Jim	Jimmy Skinner	1954	17
The Happy Time	Robert 'Bibi' Bonnard	1952	15
Treasure Island 1950	Jim Hawkins	1950	13
The Window	Tommy Woodry	1949	12
If You Knew Susie	Junior Parker	1948	11
So Dear to My Heart	Jeremiah 'Jerry' Kincaid	1948	11
Song of the South	Johnny	1946	9
O.S.S.	Gerard	1946	9
Three Wise Fools	Pixie	1946	9
The Fighting Sullivans	Al Sullivan	1944	7
The Big Bonanza	Spud Kilton	1944	7

Young Bobby Driscoll was the first actor to sign a long-term deal with Walt Disney. Even though he was the studio's first contract player, Disney terminated Driscoll's second five-year contract two years early, in 1953 at the age of 16, after the theatrical release of Peter Pan (Bobby was the voice of Peter in Disney's animated film). It is generally believed that his clinically severe acne was the reason. This prevented him from playing other feature roles for the studio that would seem to be tailor-made for him, like Johnny Tremain and The Light in the Forest. Fifteen years later Bobby would be found dead, discovered in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenement by two children.

He said about his own drug addiction: "I had everything. I was earning more than $50,000 a year, working steadily with good parts. Then I started putting all my spare time in my arm. I'm not really sure why I started using narcotics. I was 17 when I first experimented with the stuff. In no time at all I was using whatever was available, mostly heroin, because I had the money to pay for it. I have found that memories are not very useful. I was carried on a silver platter and then dumped into the garbage can."

Before his demise and downfall to drugs Bobby was considered one of cinema's most critically acclaimed boy actors, winning a special Academy Award at age 12 as the "outstanding juvenile actor" of 1949 for his excellent work in two films: So Dear to My Heart (1948) and The Window (1949). He first came to everyone's notice in 1946 at the age of 9 in Disney's Song of the South and audiences love for him carried through to Treasure Island (1950), receiving his star on Hollywood Blvd in 1954. In 1953 not only was his voice used for Walt Disney's feature Peter Pan, an actual "acting" performance was filmed, then rotoscoped for the animated character.

When found dead, his identity was unknown, believed to be a homeless person he was buried as a "John Doe" in a pauper's grave on Hart Island, New York. A year later, fingerprints finally revealed his identity. According to a 1946 Song of the South radio interview, his childhood goal was to become a U.S. Marine.