Original photo by stephen searle/ Alamy Stock Photo
From Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the entertainment industry is rife with tales of co-stars who fell in love while performing together. Given the sweet feelings their famous characters consistently displayed to one another, it's not surprising that the same fate befell longtime Mickey and Minnie Mouse voice actors Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor.
At the time Taylor beat out approximately 200 competitors to claim the voice role of Minnie in 1986, both she and Allwine (by then already established as Mickey for almost a decade) were married to other people. But their rapport as co-workers and friends soon blossomed into genuine affection, especially after each obtained a divorce, and they were married in Hawaii in 1991. The couple refused to talk publicly about their romance, preferring to keep the focus on the iconic characters they were tasked with portraying, although the cartoon hearts they radiated in one another’s presence were clear to all. According to one former colleague, Allwine would bring a ukulele to joint interviews with Taylor, and while he would launch into song as Mickey to serenade Minnie, "You knew it was Wayne talking to Russi."
After Allwine died in 2009, Taylor naturally had a difficult time returning to work with Bret Iwan, the new Mickey. Yet she pulled it together to continue with Minnie's various big- and small-screen adventures, even earning her first Primetime Emmy nomination in 2018, before joining her beloved in the great soundbooth in the sky the following year.
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The first Disney character to earn a full-length feature film was ______.
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The first Disney character to earn a full-length feature film was Snow White.
Walt Disney provided the original voices for both Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
Long before Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor were making eyes at each other in the recording studio, it was Walt Disney himself supplying the voices for what became the Magic Kingdom’s first couple. Of course, the “speaking” in the early Disney shorts largely consisted of yelps, whistles, and other noises, and by the time the studio settled into a groove with sound synching in the 1930s, Minnie’s parts were being delivered by Marcellite Garner. Yet Disney insisted on retaining the voice of Mickey for himself; according to Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, the chief was “often embarrassed” to perform as the mouse protagonist, but felt that his version offered “more pathos” than that of his would-be replacements. It wasn’t until 1947 when he finally relinquished the voice to sound effects man Jimmy MacDonald (Allwine’s immediate predecessor), though Disney reclaimed the role for himself when the Mickey Mouse Club TV series began airing in 1955.
Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
