Kathryn Beaumont

She is lying in the branches of a tree while her sister reads from a history book, and she wants a world where books are all pictures and rabbits live in houses. That is the first thing Kathryn Beaumont does in Alice in Wonderland (1951), and it sets the terms. The voice is clear and well brought up, and there is a temper under it that the film is sensible enough to let out. Alice is cross a good deal, and Beaumont never softens that into cuteness. Since the film is a string of sketches with no story to hold them, the voice is what makes them belong to the same girl.

What makes Beaumont unusual is that Disney took more than her voice. The animators filmed her moving, standing, reaching, sitting, and drew from the footage, so the way Alice tilts her head or handles a bottle is Beaumont's as well. She was chosen, in her own account, because Walt Disney wanted 'a voice for Alice that was pleasing to both sides… that wasn't too British for American ears and vice versa', and that is what it sounds like: English enough to be Carroll's, plain enough to travel. She did the same double duty two years later as Wendy Darling in Peter Pan (1953), and was hung on wires for the flying scenes although she was frightened of it. We have not reviewed that film, but the pattern is the same: a polite girl surrounded by nonsense, keeping her manners.

The reservation we have is the one we had of the film. Carroll's Alice has an argument in her; she talks back, corrects people, wins. Beaumont's is mostly a girl with a complaint, and when the jokes run down in the last act, so does she. It is a limitation of the writing more than the performance, but she does not push against it. Still, we were fonder of her than we expected. The riverbank wish, delivered with almost no sugar in it, made us believe a real child wanted that world, and we stayed on her side through the Doorknob, the shrinking bottle and the flood of tears that carries her out to sea.

After Peter Pan she finished school, took a degree in education and taught primary school children in Los Angeles for 36 years. She came back now and then for the same two parts, in House of Mouse, the Kingdom Hearts games from 2002 and theme park attractions, and stopped regular voice work in 2005, with one guest role in 2023. Most child actors spend their adult lives trying to be allowed to grow up on screen. Beaumont did it the other way round: she grew up, went to work, and kept Alice and Wendy at the age she had left them.