Ruthie Tompson
American animator (1910–2021)
Ruth Irene Tompson (July 22, 1910 – October 10, 2021) was an American camera technician, animation checker and supercentenarian. She was known for her work on animated features at The Walt Disney Company and was declared a Disney Legend in 2000.
Biography
Ruth Irene Tompson was born on July 22, 1910, in Portland, Maine, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She then moved with her family to Oakland, California, in November 1918 at age eight. She experienced the 1918 influenza pandemic near the end of World War I. In 1924, her parents divorced and her mother, Arlene, remarried artist John Roberts. The family relocated to Los Angeles and their house was in the same block as the house of Robert Disney, uncle of Walt Disney. This is where Roy and Walt Disney lived when they first came to Los Angeles.
As she stated in an interview, Tompson first met the Disneys when she visited her neighbor Robert's new baby. She recalls sitting on an apple box until her parents said they were going home for dinner. The location of The Walt Disney Company, then known as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, was not far from her home – she passed it on her way to grammar school.
“Ruthie Tompson” enters the record as american animator (1910–2021). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ruthie, Tompson and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ruthie Tompson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.