How the original Disney love story brought together two of their own

Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, on first glance, look like an average elderly couple, but in reality, they carry the magic of Disney within them.

Allwine and Taylor are the longest-serving voice actors for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, voicing their beloved characters for 32 and 33 years respectively.

Over the years working together, they fell in love, bringing that adorable type of love Mickey and Minnie were known for to life.

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Allwine began his career in the Disney mailroom, working his way up to the sound effects department, where he was chosen to be the third ever voice of Mickey, from 1977 and for the rest of his life. 

He met Taylor in 1988 when she first voiced Minnie for the television movie Totally Minnie. "He said, 'I'm so glad I'm going to have a Minnie now.' I said, 'Yes, it's pretty exciting," Taylor recalled on first meeting Allwine in a 2017 interview with Variety.

They were both married at the time, but neither of them knew that they were both unhappy in their respective marriages.

After they were both single, they "started hanging out as pals, and the next thing you know, we were an item.

"We just had fun. He was the best. He was a wonderful man, he was a good man, and he was a kind man. He was very, very strong and very, very male. And that voice came out of him. It's like, 'Huh?'" Taylor joked.

The couple were always together, with one of them often sitting in the booth while the other recorded their lines.

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Taylor even recalled, "Someone once said to us, 'What's wrong with you guys? Are you attached at the hip?' I said, 'No, we're attached at the heart.'"

However, it was a long time before they revealed that they wed in 1991, keeping it a secret for a whole decade before revealing it to the world.

"When we got married, we kind of kept it quiet, because everybody was saying, 'Oh, Mickey and Minnie got married.' It wasn't Mickey and Minnie; it was Wayne and Russi. We wanted to keep it about us and not about the characters," Taylor had told The LA Times.

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Allwine and Taylor both voiced their respective characters for the rest of their lives until Allwine's death in 2009 and Taylor's in 2019.

They were both honoured as Disney Legends in 2008 for their significant contributions to the company, and certainly, their legacy lives on.

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