Caroll Spinney

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Spinney appears on a 1970s episode of What's My Line

Caroll Spinney, sometimes credited as Carroll Spinney or Ed Spinney (born December 26, 1933 in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA) is a puppeteer most famous for playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on the children's television show Sesame Street. He graduated from Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. He has described his experience as Big Bird as "a lot like growing up to be Mickey Mouse... only taller!"

When he was in the US Air Force, Caroll wrote and illustrated Harvey, a comic strip about military life. He also animated a series of black and white cartoons called Crazy Crayon. These were done under the pseudonym "Ed Spinney."

In 1955, Spinney headed to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he created the show Rascal Rabbit. He returned to Boston, joining The Judy and Goggle Show in 1958 as a puppeteer. At this series, he was Goggle, to Judy Valentine's Judy.

Throughout the 1960s, he performed on the Boston broadcast of Bozo's Big Top, where he played Mr. Lion, who created cartoons from the names of children participating in the show. Through that decade, he was also a commercial artist and animator.

Spinney created a puppet of a cat named Picklepuss, long before he joined the inaugural cast of Sesame Street. This cat and his other friends joined Spinney in entertaining audiences of the 1960s. Spinney's Picklepuss and Pop puppets were characters in the 1988 family video Wow, You're a Cartoonist!, starring Tatyana Ali.

Spinney currently resides in Woodstock, Connecticut, with his wife, Debra. The couple has three children. His house reportedly lies exactly on the state border line.^{[citation needed]}

Spinney's first non-fiction book, The Wisdom of Big Bird.

1 As a Sesame Street puppeteer
2 Spinney's caretaker Scott Deojay
3 References
4 External links

[edit] As a Sesame Street puppeteer

As a member of the cast of Sesame Street, Spinney has acted in easily over four thousand episodes of the series. While the level of his characters' participation in plotlines has fluctuated, Big Bird and Oscar have maintained integral roles in the series over the decades.

As Oscar the Grouch he has written How to Be a Grouch, a Whitman Tell-A-Tale picture book. With J Milligan, he wrote the 2003 book The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers (ISBN 0-375-50781-7).

His work has been studied by other international puppeteers, who structure their performance styles after his, most evidently with full-body puppet costumes. The Chinese performer of Da Niao on Zhima Jie is most evident of this, as the character is an exact physical replica of Big Bird.

Over the past 36 years, Spinney has been honoured with four Daytime Emmy Awards, for his portrayals on the series, and two Grammy Awards for his related recordings. Two of the recordings Spinney performs on have earned Gold Record status. For his body of work, Spinney has received both a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994 and the Library of Congress's Living Legend award in 2000.

Over his career as Big Bird/Oscar, Spinney has:

performed the characters in Australia, China, Japan, and across Europe.
visited the White House multiple times.
conducted orchestras across the US and Canada, including the Boston Pops.
starred in the theatrically-released movie Follow that Bird, with a high-billing in Elmo in Grouchland.
served as a recording artist on dozens of albums.

In recent years Spinney has had to minimize his time performing Big Bird, due to his age. The literally heavy responsibility of performing Big Bird has gone to Matt Vogel, who performs the character in the regular "Journey to Ernie" segment, and to a very limited extent, Rick Lyon.

At the 2006 Daytime Emmy Awards, Spinney will receive the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Lifetime Achievement Award. "I am elated and amazed to receive this honor from those who are committed to the best of what television and media have to offer, for doing what I've always wanted to do."

A little known fact about Spinney is that he was the puppeteer of Baby Monster in the early 1970s. Baby was taken over by another puppeteer, becoming Elmo.

[edit] Spinney's caretaker Scott Deojay

A murdered 44-year-old woman jogger was found on Caroll Spinney's property on 13 December 2005, but Spinney was quickly cleared from the suspect list.^[1] Further investigations confirmed Spinney had no part in the crime. Scott Deojay, 36, Spinney's house's caretaker, was soon after charged by police with a capital felony. Apparently Deojay hit Judith Nilan (the jogger) with his car by accident, and hid the body on Spinney's property while Spinney was out.

A DNA sample taken from Deojay while in custody linked him with a 2004 kidnapping and rape. On 10 January 2006, Deojay was charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary and assault. He allegedly entered a woman's Plainfield, Connecticut home after midnight; after disabling the phone, he committed the assault before running off with valuables.^[2]

State's Attorney Patricia M. Froehlich refuses to speak about the case outside court, but some have suspected she will seek the death penalty.