Joe lost the part to a young actor named Bobby Driscoll (who himself would become a Disney star, voicing the title character of Peter Pan, before being let go by the studio. He would continue to make sporadic appearances throughout the 1990s and early 2000s in such films as Billy Frankenstein (1998) and The Education of a Vampire (2001).īorn in Lexington, KY, Kirk hadn’t yet reached his second birthday when he and his family moved to Downey, CA, and at age 13 he accompanied his brother, Joe, to an audition of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! at the Pasadena Playhouse. In addition to the beach movies, Kirk appeared in various low-budget sci-fi films that went from drive-in fare to cult classic lists, including 1965’s campy Village of the Giants, opposite Beau Bridges and Ron Howard, and 1968’s Mars Needs Women. He played a Martian in the 1964 feature film Pajama Party and also starred in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and It’s a Bikini World (1967).Ī couple minor skirmishes with the law over drug possession in the mid-1960s also contributed to his career problems, with a marijuana arrested reportedly leading to his being dropped from 1965’s How to Stuff a Wild Bikini starring Annette Funicello and, in the role intended for Kirk, Dwayne Hickman. It was all going to come to an end.” Kirk in Son of Flubber, 1963Īlthough he left the Disney youth films behind by the mid-’60s - following starring roles in Swiss Family Robinson (1960), The Absent Minded Professor (1961), Babes in Toyland (1961), Moon Pilot (1962), Bon Voyage! (1962), Savage Sam (an Old Yeller sequel in 1963), The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964) and The Monkey’s Uncle (1965) - Kirk went on to appear in a string of the popular beach party movies of that decade. I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that it was going to wreck my Disney career and maybe my whole acting career. “When I was about 17 or 18 years old,” he continued, “I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to change. Oh, I had some brief, very passionate encounters and as a teenager I had some affairs, but they were always stolen, back-alley kind of things. The lifestyle was not recognized, and I was very, very lonely. It wasn’t until the early ’60s that I began to hear of places where gays congregated. It was very hard to meet people and, at that time, there was no place to go to socialize. “I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings. “I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy,” Kirk added in the interview. After they found out I was involved with someone, that was the end of Disney. “Disney was a family film studio, and I was supposed to be their young leading man. Kirk said in a 1993 interview with Filmfax magazine writer Kevin Minton that he realized he was gay at age 17 or 18 and that his sexual orientation all but destroyed his career. Tom Jones Dies: 'The Fantasticks' Book Writer & Lyricist Was 95
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