Walt Disney received several special awards in the early days of the Golden Globes. The first came in 1948, for Furthering the Influence of the Screen, after he co-created the cartoon character of Mickey Mouse in 1928 and produced animated classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), andBambiAt the 5th Golden Globes ceremony, which took place at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Wednesday, March 10, 1948, the trophy, a mirrored globe on a cylindrical pedestal, was presented to Disney and Rosalind Russell, who won Best Actress for Mourning Becomes Electra, by HFCA President Frederick Porges, one of the original founders of the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association, which would later go on to become the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA).
In 1952, Disney, alongside other Hollywood legends such as Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Stanley Kramer, John Ford, Gregory Peck, and Bette Davis, was honored by the HFCA at a luncheon held at Ciro’s on May 29, for the presentation of the Cine-Revue Awards.
In 1953, Disney was the second recipient of the Cecil B. deMille Award, for Outstanding Contributions to the World of Entertainment. The newly created trophy, a globe on a tall marble pedestal surmounted by a figure holding a victory wreath, was presented to him by Cecilia DeMille Harper, the daughter of legendary filmmaker Cecil Blount deMille, and the first recipient of this career-honoring award, instituted the previous year, that would bear his name moving forward.

In 1954, Disney received an award for producing the documentary The Living Desert, part of his company’s True-Life Adventures series, which was named Best Nature Study Film of 1953. At a joint ceremony, held by the HFCA and the FPAH (Foreign Press Association of Hollywood) at Club Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, on Friday, January 22, 1954, Disney also presented the Cecil B. deMille Award to producer Darryl Zanuck.
In 1956, Disney received a Trailblazer Award for American storytelling, after producing more beloved animated movies,like Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), and Lady and the Tramp (1955). By then, he had also realized his dream of building a theme park, with Disneyland having opened in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955.
From there, Walt Disney would only further burnish his legacy, going on to produce more animated fare, like Sleeping Beauty (1959) and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), as well as the live-action musical Mary PoppinsForty years later, the story of how a chain-smoking Disney (Tom Hanks) convinced author P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to turn her Mary Poppins book series into a musical with animated sequences received its own big screen treatment, in the form of 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks.