Walt Disney Wrote A Note About Kurt Russell Before He Died

The EW article pointed out that Walt Disney met Russell when the mogul was 63 and the actor was only 13. Disney knew Russell had the potential to be a massive star, and Russell famously signed a 10-year contract while still in junior high school. For a spell in the 1970s, Russell was Disney’s most bankable star. Walt, perhaps understandably, wanted to keep his young star happy, and would communicate with Russell often. Russell recalls a relaxed, affable dude, saying, “We played a lot of Ping-Pong. […] And we talked a lot. He would ask me what I thought of things, and he knew he was getting a straight answer.” Russell was in the rare position of being unfiltered with Walt Disney, and Disney seems to have appreciated it. 

Disney died in 1966 at the age of 65, only two weeks after the release of Russell’s first Disney feature, Norman Tokar’s “Follow Me, Boys!” Disney wasn’t going to see the upswing of the young star’s popularity. Russell said to EW that, a few years after Disney passed, he was mournfully taken into the man’s old office to ponder the man’s work. It seems there was a slip of paper on Walt’s desk that merely had the words “Kurt Russell” written on it. It was, according to Russell, “the last thing he wrote.” 

To this day, no one, especially not Russell, knows what Walt was about to write.