The name Margaret Kerry may not ring a bell for most people, but if we say that she was the actress and dancer who inspired Disney's Tinker Bell in the movie Peter Pan, things change.
On June 11, Margaret passed away at the age of 97 at her home in Wilmington, North Carolina, due to lung cancer. She had three children, Ellen, Christina, and Eric, from her first marriage to Dick Brown, whom she was married to from 1951 to 1984.
Margaret's childhood was marked by the death of her mother during childbirth. As a result, her father had to make one of the most painful decisions of his life since with his salary, he couldn't support his five children, so he decided to give three of them up for adoption.
Margaret ended up in the home of the Lynch couple, with whom she moved to Los Angeles at the age of three. "I was born into a poor environment," Margaret used to recall when referring to her early entry into the world of cinema. As the family needed money, at the age of six, she made her film debut playing a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), alongside James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland, who was also making her debut on the big screen.
As a child prodigy, she appeared in several episodes of the acclaimed children's series The Little Rascals, took dance lessons with the husband of the musical film legend Cyd Charisse, and even served as a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944), which launched the violet-eyed actress to stardom.
Eddie Cantor, who chose her to star in If I Knew Susie (1948), changed her name from Peggy Lynch to Margaret Kerry, considering it much more commercial. Later, her most notable work was as one of the leads in The Ruggles (1949-1952), where she met her first husband, Dick Brown, the director of the series.
Margaret's big break came when in 1952 Disney was desperately looking for a young woman who could serve as a model for the animated character of Tinker Bell. Her agent sent her to the studios for an audition. "They were looking for a young girl who felt comfortable with dance movements," explained the actress.
The story of how she landed one of the most iconic roles in cinema history has been detailed by The Hollywood Reporter following an interview conducted by Jim Korkis in 2003. Margaret came up with a plan for the audition.
"At home, I had a room set up, my dance studio, with all those mirrors and a bar. So I took this record player, put on an instrumental record, and performed a pantomime of a 9-year-old preparing breakfast to the rhythm of the record. You know, carrying eggs and maybe dropping one, closing the fridge door with a foot, etc., all sorts of movements I could do within the context of a little story."
And she continued: "The next day I went to the studio, grabbed the record player, put on a 45 rpm record, and did a mime. I choreographed a three-and-a-half-minute routine with this old record." She was hired, and for the next nine months, she moved "across a vast soundstage that seemed to have no end," wearing her own one-piece swimsuit and hair tied up in a bun (...)".
"(...) There was no one to react to. I had to imagine almost everything. There were occasional props, like giant scissors or a wire lock or something. Most of the time, I was just pretending to look up from under something or just walking around." In this way, Margaret won the hearts of children for generations.
During the last three decades of her life, she worked as a producer, motivational speaker, writer, and host of a show on a Christian radio station in Los Angeles. Her autobiography, Tinker Bell Talks: Tales of a Pixie-Dusted Life, was published in 2016.
Although it may seem unbelievable, in her later years, she reunited with her first boyfriend, a retired Mobil Oil executive named Robert Boecke, whom she married on Valentine's Day in 2020. The curious part of this love story interrupted by two marriages is that Margaret had kept a bracelet he had given her in her teenage years.
The couple remained married until Boecke's passing on May 24 at the age of 100. It hasn't been a month before she joins him in the same sky that made her famous in cinema history.
In her obituary, her family recalled Peter Pan's guidance to children to reach Neverland: "And remember: any night, look at the night sky and search for that 'second star to the right.' If you look closely, you might notice that that star shines a little brighter in honor of Margaret."