April 21, 1915 – Film Editor and Disney Legend Lloyd Richardson is Born
“Lloyd gave his all to the Disneyland series. His work was impeccable.” – Disney Legend Stormy Palmer
On April 21, 1915, Lloyd Richardson was born in Portland, Oregon. He attended the Los Angeles City College but, during the throes of the Depression, he dropped out to start working. He was able to score a job in traffic at the Disney Studios in 1937, and soon after joined the Editing Department, where he was able to flourish. Starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, Richardson quickly learned the craft of film editing, and soon became an editor-at-large for a variety of projects, including foreign film editing that helped match foreign language tracks to the animation, and editing the training films by the studio during World War II. He continued to edit the animated features as he moved his skills to the True-Life Adventures series, eventually editing the Academy Award winning shorts Bear Country and The Vanishing Prairie. As the studio progressed into the television medium, Richardson moved into directing alongside editing, and eventually worked on over 50 different television projects. For his body of work, Richardson has won an American Cinema Editors Award for Chico, The Misunderstood Coyote, and an Academy Award with Ward Kimball for the short film It’s Tough to Be a Bird. He retired in 1980, after 40 years with the studio. He was honored as a Disney Legend in 1998. He passed away in 2002 at the age of 86.