The incomparable Margaret Kerry passed away earlier this month at the age of 97. Ms. Kerry was a dancer, model, voice actor, broadcaster, and filmmaker and there’s a chance you already know what she was most famous for. For those of you that don’t, she was the reference model for the role of Tinkerbell and the Neverland mermaids in Walt Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan film.

What’s a reference model? Essentially, during the early 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Disney’s animators, in an effort to capture lifelike motion more effectively, developed a system whereby they filmed key scenes for their feature films in live action in order to study how the actors and scenery moved to replicate in their drawings. Unlike the more well-known rotoscoping technique, they didn’t directly trace over the footage, but used the footage more like a life model for a figure drawing class that they could build an original drawing around, adding the squash, stretch, and stylization that makes animation feel alive. In 1951 Kerry was hired by animator and future imagineer Marc Davis to provide reference poses for Tink, reasoning that since she doesn’t talk in the film, a dancer would be best to provide her with expressive movement. Davis also based Tink’s figure and facial features on Kerry– not, as urban legend has often passed down, on Marilyn Monroe, who wasn’t famous yet at the time. According to some tellings, she got the job because she improvised the moment, later scene in the film, when Tink, dancing across a hand mirror, stops to measure her hips and is shocked at the result. She can be heard in the film as the voice of the red-haired mermaid who wants to drown Wendy.

When she appeared in Peter Pan, she had already had years of experience playing fairies. Her first film role, at only six years old, was as a fairy in MGM’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She also starred in three Little Rascals shorts, served as a body double for Liz Taylor, and was a regular cast member in The Ruggles, the first-ever TV sitcom, as well as Clutch Cargo. Later in life, Kerry wrote a memoir of her experiences, toured the convention circuit into her 90s, and hosted a Christian radio station in LA from 1992 to 2014. She was married three times, the last time to Robert Boeke, her former teenage sweetheart, with whom she reconnected in 2019 after not seeing him for 70 years. She suffered from face blindness. Robert passed away in May of this year, only three weeks before Ms. Kerry herself.

Although the original reference footage she filmed for Peter Pan hasn’t been made public, stills from it are available. Check out this short, which juxtaposes some of those stills with Tink’s movements in the finished animation.

Here also follow several other pictures of Margaret and the characters she inspired. I’m particularly fond of this one of her with Peter Pan at Disneyland. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, she and Mae Whitman, the voice of Tink in more recent projects, never met, or if they did they were not photographed together.