#aliceedit

Disney found her when he went looking for someone with a child's voice for the lead role in his animated movie "Alice in Wonderland." "Basically, I was sort of right under his nose," Beaumont, who had worked on a Disney TV episode for the year before, recalls with a laugh. "Walt Disney was looking for a voice that would be pleasing to American ears and British ears, something that wouldn't be too American for the British or too British for the Americans. And oddly enough we were already out here." What's more, she knew the whole story of Alice, as well as Peter Pan. "Just from being British in the first place," she says, "Those are the things you tend to read as a child." So she was cast in both movies. And off she went each day to Disney Studios, getting her schooling in the three Rs as well as in songs about never growing up and imaginary Wonderlands, and in fighting off hungry crocodiles and comically evil pirates. But after "Alice" and "Peter Pan" came out in 1953, Kathryn Beaumont grew up. After making two of the biggest animated movies of all time, she left Hollywood and never went back. "I just went into another career," she says matter-of-factly. "I was just very young when I did these roles, so I went back to school and I had other ideas of things I wanted to do." She went into teaching generations of second-graders the animation experiences she had as a child.

film: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, released in 1951