Adriana Caselotti: Disney Princess
On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered.
Let’s talk about the voice behind the original Disney Princess: Adriana Caselotti.
Adriana came from a musical family. Her mother, Marianne,
was an opera singer who spent many years performing with the Royal Opera Theatre
in Rome. Her father, Guido, was a vocal teacher. Her older sister, Louise, was
also an opera singer and vocal coach—her most famous client was Maria Callas.
So needless to say, Adriana could hold her own. And when she
overheard her father on the telephone with Roy Scott, a casting director working
for Walt Disney, she picked up the extension and listened in.
Scott had been searching high and low for the voice of Snow
White and had already auditioned many young women. He was calling Guido to see
if he had any students he’d recommend, and Adriana interrupted.
“Listen to me—wouldn’t my voice do?” Adriana asked. Her
father tried to shush her, but Adriana began singing and talking with a little
girl voice over the phone, and Scott liked what he heard. He brought Adriana in
for an audition, and unbeknownst to the soon-to-be princess, Walt Disney was
listening in covertly.
Adriana would recall in a 1987 interview with Animation
magazine that the songs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were “intricate
coloratura work that, fortunately, I knew how to do.”
When she arrived for her audition, the session pianist wanted
her to wait until he walked across the room to his piano so he could guide her through
the song. She could sight-read, and before he’d gotten to his seat, she was
already singing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’
This was September 1934. It took a year, but in September
1935, Adriana was officially offered the role of Snow White. She beat out 150
other women, including Deanna Durbin.
Adriana’s contract was strict: no singing on the radio or in
films until Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out—which wouldn’t be
for another two years—and $20 per day for every day that she worked, for a
grand total of $970 (or around $20,681 in today’s dollars).
When Adriana went into work, she would record her lines and
her songs while the animators watched her and tried to find inspiration for the
character. She wasn’t Snow White’s live action model, that was Marge Champion
(who I’ve previously written about here), but bits and pieces of the voice
actress always seem to make it into the final film (you’ll hear both Ilene Woods
and Mary Costa attest to this as well). For Adriana, this was passing on her
hand singing to Snow White.
And speaking of the film… Adriana had no idea that she
was lending her voice to the first feature-length animated film. “They had
said it would be longer than their usual seven minute shorts, so I figured that
it would be maybe a 20 or 25 minute short,” she told Animation
magazine. “They didn’t say and I was a dumb little kid and didn’t ask!”
Although her singing voice was beyond compare, Adriana would
recall that her acting abilities were rusty in comparison, and she would stumble
over lines to everyone’s frustrations. But she put in the work and helped Walt
Disney finish his historic film.
You just… won’t find her name on the film anywhere. She wasn’t
credited, like Ilene Woods and Mary Costa later were. “Walt Disney thought
it would spoil the illusion if you knew who the people were who provided the
voices in the film,” she later said.
She also wasn’t invited to the film’s premiere in December
1937: she and Harry Stockwell, who provided the voice of The Prince, had to sneak
in. She told the story in interviews about the two showing up at the theatre
without tickets and the ticket-taker trying to stop them from entering.
“I said, ‘I’m Snow White and this is Prince Charming and
we don’t need any ticket,’” Adriana told Entertainment Weekly in
1993. “She said, ‘I don’t care if you’re the Old Witch, you need tickets to
get in here.’ We waited until she wasn’t looking and snuck upstairs into the
balcony.”
Adriana’s contract was stifling, too, after Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs premiered. Walt had ensured that her voice and likeness
would only ever be associated with Snow White’s, so she couldn’t take on any
other acting work. Anyone who asked to work with her, like Jack Benny, were
told that she was unavailable.
You can hear her in The Wizard of Oz, singing “Wherefore
art thou, Romeo?” in ‘If I Only Had a Heart’ and singing on the jukebox in It’s
a Wonderful Life, but those roles are uncredited. Of the handful of roles
listed on her Wikipedia page, most are uncredited or related to Disney.
But Adriana was happy to be forever associated with Snow
White. She continued to promote the film for the rest of her life, and voiced
Snow White in various incarnations up until the early 1990s.
For the Montreal Expo in 1967, she recorded lines as Snow White
for the Telephone Association of Canada Exhibit so that children could dial a
special telephone number to talk to the Disney Princess.
She also sang a version of ‘I’m Wishing’ for the Snow White
Grotto at Disneyland; and in 1991, re-recorded the song at the age of 75 when
the original needed replacing.
She dressed up as Snow White to visit children’s hospitals
and schools every time the film was re-released; lived in a house filled with Snow
White memorabilia (you can watch a house tour here,
it’s very charming!); and even sang ‘I’m Wishing’ on her voicemail.
But my favourite clip I’ve found of Adriana is a 1972
appearance on The Julie Andrews Hour when she sang a medley of Snow
White songs with Julie during an hour-long salute to Walt Disney. She sings ‘I’m
Wishing’ and ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ just as well as she’d done in 1937.
You can watch the performance here.
As Adriana said in Animator magazine: “I love
being thought of as Snow White, even at my time of life! I’m so grateful. It’s
much better to have been a part of one of the greatest films ever made than ten
mediocre ones.”
In 1994, Adriana was the first voice actress to be named a
Disney Legend; Mary Costa and Ilene Woods would follow suit within the next 10
years. She is also reported to have sued Walt Disney Studios for higher compensation
for the role, but I can’t find anything on the lawsuit like I could with Ilene’s
or Mary’s.
Today, Snow White is voiced by Katherine Von Till, who has done
so since 2011. In 2024, a live action version of Snow White will hit the
big screen, with Rachel Zegler as the princess.
“I know that my voice will never die,” Adriana told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. She passed away on January 19, 1997 at the age of 80. Roy Disney paid tribute to her, recognizing the invaluable contribution she’d made back in 1937: “This is certainly the end of an era.”
As Adriana once said: “You will see it all your life and, no matter what happens, it will be preserved—even 2,000 years from now—and I know that my voice will live forever, and that makes me very happy!”
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