Ilene Woods is remembered for one performance, and it is a good one: the low, sensible, unhurried voice that makes Disney's Cinderella (1950) a person rather than a drawing with good posture. The animation never quite catches up to her.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to Cinderella the next time the film is on, and notice how little Ilene Woods pushes. The stepmother snaps, the stepsisters screech, the cat plots, and in the middle of it a young woman answers in a low, even, sensible voice, as if she has already decided none of this is worth raising her own. She sings the same way. There is no trilling in it; it is the manner of a late-1940s radio singer, nearer Dinah Shore than a fairy-tale soprano, and it is what makes the character someone you can stand to spend an evening with.
We scored Cinderella (1950) a 72 and said the heroine was one of the thinnest things in it, and we stand by that. But the thinness is in the drawing, not the voice. The animators give her a doll with good posture. Woods gives her patience and a dry, domestic warmth, so that when she asks for nothing more than a night off you believe she means exactly that and not a word more. Going back to it, what struck us was how much of our liking for the character was coming out of the speaker rather than off the screen. Shut your eyes during the duet and she holds up perfectly well, opposite a Prince who has been given one song, sung for him by Mike Douglas, and no personality to go with it.
The performance came about sideways. In 1948 she recorded demos of the songs for Mack David and Jerry Livingston, in a studio with a piano; Walt Disney heard them, picked her out of more than 300 candidates, and she recorded the part over roughly two years. Marc Davis sat in on the sessions and carried her facial expressions and hand movements into the drawing. Which makes it odder that the figure on screen has less life than the voice behind it. Whatever Davis took across, it was the posture and not the warmth.
There is not much else to weigh. Woods was a radio singer from her teens, with her own programme by 1944, and she worked in television through the 1950s with Arthur Godfrey and Garry Moore. Her one on-screen film credit is On Stage Everybody (1945), as a talent-show winner; we have not reviewed it and will not pretend to have judged it. She retired in 1972.
A career with one film in it is not usually a career, and Woods seems to have known that and not minded. "I love the idea that after I'm gone, children will still be hearing my voice [as Cinderella]," she said in 2006. It is a modest ambition, plainly stated, and she has got it.
Biography
Ilene Woods was an American actress and singer. She provided the speaking and singing voice of the title character in Walt Disney's 1950 animated feature film Cinderella.
Born Jacqueline Ruth Woods on 5 May 1929 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she began performing on radio in her teens and hosted her own musical series, The Ilene Woods Show. In 1948 she recorded demo versions of songs for the film as a favour to songwriters Mack David and Jerry Livingston; Walt Disney heard the recordings and cast her in the role.
Woods was named a Disney Legend in 2003. She died on 1 July 2010.
