Diane Disney Miller obituary

When Diane Disney Miller was born, the Los Angeles Times announced: "Mickey Mouse has a daughter." It was a testament to the fame of her father, Walt Disney, and the cartoon star on whose popularity one of the great entertainment empires of the world would be built. For Diane, who has died aged 79 as a result of complications following a fall, this might have been the prelude to a life of celebrity, but her parents shielded her from all that. There was a family story that when, as a child, Diane discovered from school friends that she had a famous father, she asked him, "Are you Walt Disney? The Walt Disney?" and, on being told that he was, asked for his autograph. Diane, who tended to dismiss this as a piece of embellishment, personally eschewed the limelight for almost 60 years until increasingly negative publicity about her father prompted her to publicly defend his reputation.

In the early 1940s, with her adopted sister, Sharon, and their mother, Lillian, she was instrumental in drawing her father's attention to a much-loved book, Mary Poppins. It was an introduction that initiated Disney's 20-year quest to secure the film rights to PL Travers's character and is key to the plot of the film Saving Mr Banks, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.

Diane's other significant contribution to her father's career was providing the impetus and inspiration for the creation of Disneyland, the beginning of what is now a worldwide theme-park business. "In taking my sister and I to playgrounds," she once said, "he realised there was nothing for grown-ups to do."

For many years, her only brush with public life was upon the publication, in 1956, of the first biography of her father, previewed in the Saturday Evening Post as "My Dad Walt Disney: the intimate story of America's best-loved least-known genius told by his daughter." In truth, The Story of Walt Disney "by Diane Disney Miller as told to Pete Martin" was drawn largely from Disney's own interviews with the popular Hollywood biographer, but cast in the form of a daughter's memoir rather than as her father's autobiography, to provide the recently married Diane with a source of personal income.

Two years earlier, as a result of a blind date, she had met and married Ron Miller, a professional athlete who later played football for the Los Angeles Rams and, on retiring from the game after an injury, joined his father-in-law's studio. During those years, the Millers had seven children and Diane led a very private life as a wife and mother.

Following Walt Disney's death, Ron Miller was appointed company president and then chief executive, a role he held until being ousted in a very public corporate coup in 1984, whereupon the couple left Hollywood for San Francisco and the Napa Valley. They ran a winery and later started the successful Silverado Vineyards.

It was the publication, in 1993, of Marc Eliot's iconoclastic biography Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince that caused Diane and her mother to make a public stand, denouncing the book for its negative interpretation of Disney's personality and relationships, and challenging the accuracy of claims such as that Disney had acted as an FBI informant. It was the latest in a trend for revisionist readings of the Disney legend and when, a few years later, Diane and I made a radio series for the BBC about her father, she told me: "It's very important that Walt Disney the man is known for exactly who and what he was, and not some distortion."

As well as fearlessly championing her father's memory, she was instrumental in ensuring the realisation of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles as a legacy. It had been inaugurated with a gift of $50m from Disney's widow and had a visionary design by Frank Gehry. The venture became snared in a decade of delays, rising costs and an attempt to remove Gehry from the project, but Diane supported the designs and fought for the creation of the arts venue that would become home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. With further substantial donations from the Disney family, the hall was completed in 2003. "I wanted something," said Diane, "that would bear my father's name, that would come from his wealth but not be commercial."

Becoming increasingly at ease with her public persona, Diane created the Disney Family Foundation, backed the making of the 2001 film documentary Walt: The Man Behind the Myth, contributed to programmes and publications about the work of her father and, most recently, oversaw the creation of the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. A couple of years before its opening in 2009, I clambered about the dusty, debris-strewn shell of the building while she described to me how it would look when it was complete. In her excitement and enthusiasm, it was impossible not to see someone who was very much her father's daughter.

Diane is survived by her husband, their seven children, Christopher, Joanna, Tamara, Jennifer, Walter, Ronald and Patrick, and 13 grandchildren.