Walter Benjamin Lantz, an animator, producer, and director, was born in New Rochelle, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. His father, whose surname Lanzas was anglicized to Lantz by an immigration official, was a soap maker by trade but became a butcher after moving to New Rochelle. Interested in art from an early age, Walter completed a mail-order drawing class at age 12. While working as an auto mechanic, he gained his first opportunity when a wealthy customer, Fred Kafka, admired his drawings on the garage bulletin board, financed his studies at the Art Students League, and helped him secure a job as a copy boy at the New York American. In 1927, Walter Lantz moved to Hollywood, worked as an independent producer, and founded Walter Lantz Productions. His best-known cartoon characters were Andy Panda, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Woody Woodpecker, and he is also credited with producing the first Technicolor cartoon. During Lantz's 1940 honeymoon with actress Grace Strafford at a lakeside cottage, a woodpecker drilling holes in the roof shingles inspired his most famous creation after Grace suggested adapting the bird as a cartoon character. Although Lantz first rejected her because Woody was a male character, Grace secretly recorded an audition tape and submitted it anonymously, and Lantz chose her voice to perform Woody and his raucous laugh. Walter Lantz later received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement for his contributions to animation, his Woody Woodpecker artifacts became part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection, and in 1986 he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.