SNOW WHITE’S VOICE

Southland Times, Issue 23553, 6 July 1938, Page 8

SNOW WHITE’S VOICE

_ - UNSEEN PLAYERS IN CARTOON WALT DISNEY’S BORED STARS

While Walt Disney’s synthetic characters continue to prosper on the screen, at least two of the flesh-and-blood players connected with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” are profoundly disgruntled. One is Adriana Caselotti, a 21-year-old Hollywood brunette, who, has jumped into sudden fame as “Snow White’s Voice.” At first Miss Caselotti found her role exciting. But the film, Walt Disney’s first full-length feature, took about three years to make, and as the years went by she became very sick of it. When at last the film did open, she complains, she and her mother did not have a seat, and they had to stand in an aisle all through the show. A trip to New York followed, but here again she was disappointed. “I have to wear my hair long and fluffy to look like Snow White,” she says. “She wears a ribbon round it, so I have to wear a ribbon, too. It is silly. And I can’t even take a cocktail in public for fear of disillusioning somebody.” Her little-girl role is made more tiresome by the fact that she has just married one of Mr Disney’s staff. Even more affecting is the fate of Billy Gilbert, the 17st 21b actor, who sneezed for the dwarf called Sneezy. All fame is ephemeral, but fame as a sneezer,- Mr Gilbert fears, is the most ephemeral of all. Today it is here; tomorrow it is gone with the wind. And Mr Gilbert feels he has other talents. At first he, too, found acting for cartoons was fun. But sneezing on and off for 14 years grew somewhat monotonous, and even when they gave him a line, “The sugar’s gone,” that grew monotonous, too, after two weeks’ shooting. “I don’t want to go the way of otherspecialists,” Mr Gilbert points out. “I don’t want to be like the stutterer who stuttered himself out of pictures.” (Can this be an allusion to Roscoe Ates?) “I have included a clause in my contract which says that I don’t have to sneeze in more than two pictures a year —and then only if it’s essential to the story. “I would rather talk about some other phase of my art, but if people will ask about sneezing—well, there are 40-odd varieties.”