Diane Marie Disney was born on 18 December 1933, in Los Angeles, California USA, and was a philanthropist, best known as a daughter of the legendary Walt Disney and his wife Lillian Bounds Disney, but then as Diane Disney Miller following her marriage.
So just how wealthy was Diane Disney Miller? Sources state that Miller had acquired a fortune of over $500 million, partly inherited from her late father, the rest earned through Miller’s personal business ventures.
Diane Disney Miller Net Worth $500 Million
When she was born, The Los Angeles Times declared: “Mickey Mouse has a daughter”. Prior to her birth, Walt Disney had created the character of Mickey Mouse, earning a great deal of popularity. In the years to come, he would become a co-owner of one of the largest and best-known entertainment companies in the world, The Walt Disney Company, and perhaps the biggest cartoon star, on whose fame one of the greatest entertainment empires of the world, the Disneyland, would be built.
However, Miller grew up being shielded from the fame her father achieved, along with her adopted sister, Sharon Disney Brown. Miller attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but dropped out in her junior year.
Her first contact with the public world came in the mid-’50s, when she published the first biography of her father, “My Dad Walt Disney“, which she co-wrote with Pete Martin, and shortly afterwards she published the book “The Story of Walt Disney” – both publications greatly added to her net worth.
Miller contributed to her father’s work in several ways; for example, she claimed that, in taking her sister and her to playgrounds, Disney came up with a great idea that would later develop into the creation of Disneyland. Also, she played a key role in drawing her father’s attention to a much-loved book, “Mary Poppins”.
Miller kept her life away from public view for almost 60 years, until the growing negative publicity following Disney’s death forced her to begin protecting her father’s name. She went on to devote much of her time to preserve his legacy and the Disney family name and image, challenging the accuracy of claims such as that Disney had been a homosexual, and/or an FBI informant.
In the early ’80s, Miller and her family left Hollywood for San Francisco and the Napa Valley, where they began to run a winery, and later started the successful Silverado Vineyards. Miller also became involved in Bay Area arts organizations and served on the board of the San Francisco Symphony.
Miller later played a key part in completing what her mother initiated back in 1988, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Lillian Disney started the project as a people’s music center that would host popular acts, by providing a $50 million gift. However, the launching was stalled due to cost negotiations and heated battles over its design. Miller went on to push the project ahead, eventually choosing the award-winning architect Frank Gehry to work on it. The project was stalled once again, as some of its leaders considered that Gehry lacked the experience to successfully create the building’s complicated design. Miller, however, demanded the architect be kept on and the project proceed, threatening to withhold around $20 million that remained of her mother’s gift. Gehry was kept on, and, with further substantial donations from the Disney family, the hall finally opened in 2004.
She also created the Disney Family Foundation, serving as president of the board, and contributing to various programs and publications about her father, such as the 2001 documentary “Walt: The Man Behind the Myth”.
Being concerned that her father’s name had become related more to a corporate logo than to the man himself, Miller started another big project, when in 2009 she founded the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, as another tribute to her family’s legacy, financing it through the Disney Family Foundation.
In her private life, Miller was married to Ron Miller, a professional athlete who once played football for the Los Angeles Rams and later served as the President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. The couple married in 1954 and remained together until her death in 2013 from medical complications following a fall; they had seven children.
