Margaret Kerry, who through months of graceful and poignant pantomime inspired the portrayal of the Peter Pan fairy Tinker Bell that the world knows best, died on June 11 at her home in Wilmington, N.C. She was 97.
The cause was lung cancer, her family announced on social media.
Tinker Bell’s origins lie in “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” (1904), a play by the British writer J.M. Barrie later expanded into a novel, “Peter and Wendy” (1911). Mr. Barrie invented “fairy dust” to explain how Tinker Bell could enable children to fly, but in his story, she was “quite a common fairy” who fixes pots and pans. Peter ultimately forgets about her, and in stage performances, she was only a spotlight.
With Ms. Kerry’s help, Disney’s original animated film adaptation, “Peter Pan” (1953), produced a version of Tinker Bell that became definitive.
In the movie, the fairy communicates only through movement and expression; she does not speak.
To reinvent and animate the character, Marc Davis — the illustrator behind Snow White, Cinderella and Cruella de Vil — oversaw an industrial equivalent of the modeling demanded by perfectionist painters like Ingres or Cézanne. Along with a few prop specialists, a cameraman, a makeup artist and one or more directors, he spent more than six months having an actress act out everything he wanted Tinker Bell to do.
“Marc Davis is a man’s man — how does he know how a three and a half-inch sprite is going to move, get angry, or stamp her foot?” Ms. Kerry said to The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “And how does he know what kind of emotion would go behind that?”
Ms. Kerry brought a record player to her audition for Mr. Davis and the director Gerry Geronimi. With musical backing, she did a pantomime of making breakfast: Peering into a refrigerator, juggling eggs, closing the fridge door with her foot — “as much variety of movement as I could do in the context of a little story,” she said in a 2003 interview with the historian Jim Korkis.
She got the job. The first time she stepped onto Disney’s enormous, empty soundstage, she asked Mr. Davis who he wanted her to be — ditsy like Betty Boop? Above it all, like the Queen of the Fairies?
“He said, very quietly, ‘Margaret, we want her to be you,’” Ms. Kerry recalled in an interview with the author and YouTube host Jonathan Rosen.
“At that moment,” she told Parade in 2016, “Tinker Bell and I became one.”
One day she was asked, What would it look like if Tinker Bell landed on a mirror and saw herself? Ms. Kerry thought perhaps she would never have seen her reflection, so she began a preening once-over — until she reached her hips, got upset and stormed off. That became a scene in “Peter Pan.”
She was asked to fall onto a mattress — which, she soon discovered, was rather thin, causing her to thud on impact. Her look of pained surprise also made it into the film.
She was asked to pout. She demonstrated a whole menu of pouts and asked, What kind do you want?
She imagined Tinker Bell as a 13-year-old girl. That helped Mr. Davis capture one of the character’s most distinctive traits: Mr. Barrie’s idea that fairies are so small that they “have room for one feeling only at a time.” Mr. Davis’s Tink is consumed by competitiveness with Wendy, or consumed by fear for Peter — always just one feeling, felt to the utmost.
Margaret Kerry was born Margaret McCarty on May 11, 1929, in Springfield, Ill. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was unable to take care of his five children, Parade reported. She was adopted at 3 by Frederick and Grace (Lynch) Robb, who lived in Los Angeles.
Mr. Robb was a salesman for Durametallic Corporation, an industrial manufacturer. The couple decided their adoptive daughter was “as cute as Shirley Temple,” Ms. Kerry later recalled, and by the time she was 4 she was in Central Casting. She found a lot of work in Hollywood, including appearing in eight of the “Our Gang” short films about the Little Rascals.
Her stage name was originally Peggy Lynch. In 1948, she played the daughter of Eddie Cantor’s character in the movie “If You Knew Susie.” She changed her name to Margaret Kerry at Mr. Cantor’s suggestion.
In later years, she did voice-over work and hosted a weekly Christian talk show on Los Angeles radio.
She married Dick Brown, a television producer and director, in 1951. They divorced in the 1980s. Her marriage to Jack Willcox, in 1987, ended with his death in 1999. She is survived by three children from her first marriage, Eric Norquist, Christina McCarty and Ellen Seibel, as well as several grandchildren.
In 2019, a veteran of D-Day, Robert Boeke, visited Europe to mark its 75th anniversary. He passed a store in Amsterdam called Tinker Bell Toys and said to a travel buddy, “I have been in love with Tinker Bell all my life.”
He was being literal: Mr. Boeke and Ms. Kerry dated when he was a college student in Los Angeles. A friend of his promptly found her email address and sent her a note. He assumed she had forgotten him.
But the email, like a bit of fairy dust, caused something to improbably take flight. Ms. Kerry had saved a piece of jewelry that Mr. Boeke gave her all those years ago.
On Valentine’s Day 2020, they married. They got together just in time to keep each other company through the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr. Boeke lived until just two and a half weeks before Ms. Kerry’s death. She told Mr. Rosen, “It was love at second sight.”
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