Annette funicello biography mouseketeers
•
Summer is here. Time for naps in the shade, cool drinks, a dip in the water and, if we are lucky, a trip to the cinema theater to see a beach movie. In the s the theatrical features were packed with tanned and scantily clad teenagers. Clearly, they loved to dance in the sand to the sounds of surf music. The blue Pacific Ocean kept waving in the background. Let’s take a look at half of the genre’s star couple.
Annette Funicello was born in in Utica, New York, to Italian American parents. The family moved to Southern California when she was four years old. Because she was considered a shy child, her parents encouraged her to take dancing and music lessons.
When she was 12 years old, she was cast as one of the original Mouseketeers — the last to be chosen, and one of the few cast members to be personally selected by Walt Disney. Annette was the most popular Mouseketeer.
The song that launched her singing career was How Will I Know My Love. It sold so well that Disney sig
•
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, 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, , 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 , 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 dance scho
•
RELATED STORIES
On this day in , America’s Mousekesweetheart Annette Funicello was born in Utica, New York.
Just a few years later she become the last of the initial 24 children selected to appear as Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club, quickly becoming a mouskefavorite. In fact, bygd the end of the first season of the show, her fan mail had ballooned to 6, letters a month.
In later years, Annette continued to enjoy success in television and rulle in both Disney and non-Disney television shows and films such as Make Room For Daddy and the Disney series Zorro, The Horsemasters, and Elfego Baca and feature films such as The Shaggy Dog, Babes in Toyland, and The Monkey’s Uncle. As a teenager she sang her way into the hearts of America as a recording artist with 15 record albums for Disney, and she starred in a string of successful Beach movies with teen idol Frankie Avalon.
In , she released her autobiography A Dream fryst vatten A Wish Your Heart Makes: My St