Mary Costa's screen career is, in effect, one performance: the singing voice of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty (1959). A lovely, opera-trained soprano, and the best thing about a princess the script gives almost nothing to do.
Fi1m perspective
Briar Rose walks into a forest clearing, sings to the birds, and for a couple of minutes the coldest of Disney's fairy tales has a pulse. The voice is Mary Costa's, and it is a proper lyric soprano: clean, agile, with a warmth the drawing itself never quite manages. She then borrows a stranger's cloak and boots, dances with her animal friends, and is charming. Then she meets Bill Shirley's Phillip for one duet, is sent home, and sleeps through a large part of the film that carries her name.
That is almost the whole screen career, and it was finished before it began. Walt Disney cast her in 1952, at 22, and she recorded Aurora from 1952 to 1955; the film did not reach cinemas until 1959, by which time she had made her professional opera debut, in 1957, and was on her way to the stage. Her own account is disarming: she has said she had no experience at all when she started, and that by the time the film came out she was already singing in the opera. She sang Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein's Candide at its London premiere in 1959, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1964 as Violetta in La Traviata, the role she returned to more often than any other, and performed more than 40 roles before leaving the stage in the mid-1980s. There were a few live-action films, among them The Great Waltz (1972), but film was a sideline.
What she does that other Disney voices do not is sing as though the notes matter more than the character, and here that is a virtue, because the character has almost nothing to want. The forest song still catches us: the voice is so much bigger and cleaner than the girl on screen that for a moment Aurora seems like a person, and we were sorry when the film put her back to bed. The fault, as we said in our review, is not Costa's. Eleanor Audley's Maleficent has the lines, Phillip gets a horse and a sword, and the princess gets a bed. Costa can only do what the songs give her, and there are not many songs.
It leaves an odd shape for a page like this: a singer of long standing whose film work fits on a single line. She has said herself that Aurora is the role that keeps her close to young people, and that seems the right way to hear it. Go to Sleeping Beauty for Eyvind Earle's backgrounds and Audley's villain, and wait for the voice in the forest. It does not stay long, but it is the one warm thing in the film.
Biography
Mary Costa is an American opera singer and actress. She provided the voice of Princess Aurora in Walt Disney's 1959 animated feature Sleeping Beauty.
Costa trained at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. She performed more than 40 operatic roles at major houses including the Metropolitan Opera and appeared as herself on The Oscars (1953). She was named a Disney Legend in 1999 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2020.
