Early Life
Born Robert Cletus Driscoll in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Driscoll was the only child of Cletus Driscoll, an insulation salesman, and Isabelle Kratz Driscoll, a former schoolteacher. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Des Moines, where they stayed until early 1943. When a doctor advised the father to relocate to balmy California due to pulmonary ailments he was suffering from his work-related handling of asbestos, the family moved to Los Angeles. Driscoll's barber urged his parents to try to get the cute child into the movies, and the man's son, an occasional actor, got him an audition at MGM for a bit role in the 1943 family drama Lost Angel, which starred up-and-coming Margaret O'Brien. While on a tour across the studio lot, five-year-old Driscoll noticed a mock-up ship and asked where the water was. The director was impressed by the boy's curiosity and intelligence, and chose him out of forty applicants.
Read more about this topic: Bobby Driscoll
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)