MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Peter Pan's Tinker Bell was visually based on Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe's movie career began in earnest in 1950. She had her last major hit film in 1959. That's a span of just ten years, and yet, her influence on popular culture based just on those ten years is practically immeasurable. I have a rule that I call the Mark Twain Rule of Gravitational Influence, which suggests that the greater a celebrity's fame is, the more pull they will have on popular culture, which is exemplified by the fact that any old clever saying gets misattributed to Mark Twain. When it comes to blonde bombshells, Marilyn Monroe has that same oversized influence, and as a result, she almost becomes the shorthand reference for the public when it comes to discussing the idea of blonde bombshells. A natural side effect of that is that Monroe is also the target of a number of legends, as her fame keeps getting her pulled into stories whether they are true or not.
One of these stories is that Walt Disney had his animators use Monroe as the visual inspiration for Tinker Bell in 1953's animated classic, Peter Pan. Is it true?
WHAT IS THE LEGEND OF MARILYN MONROE BEING THE VISUAL INSPIRATION FOR TINKER BELL?
It's interesting to note that Tinker Bell really is a lot like Marilyn Monroe, in that despite "only" having the one Peter Pan appearance for decades, she had an oversized influence on Walt Disney properties period, as she became one of the characters most closely associated with the Walt Disney brand, due to her use in the introduction of Walt Disney's first television series, Walt Disney's Disneyland (one of two shows that Disney launched to help pay for the development of his then-new amusement park, Disneyland, the other being The Mickey Mouse Club). She was likely used there simply because she was one of the newest Disney characters, but because of that one use of Tinker Bell in the opening...
the opening soon became so iconic that Tinker Bell simply kept being used in the introductions of Disney film and television properties for years afterward, like Disney shows in the United Kingdom...
or, after a brief period in the mid-1980s when there briefly was NO Disney presence on broadcast television following ABC dropping its long-running Disney anthology series (and CBS only briefly doing its own Disney-themed series), The Disney Sunday Movie returned in 1986, complete with Tinker Bell...
and on Disney home video productions (both VHS and DVD. I don't feel like sharing all of them, but just trust me that so long as Disney has been doing home video products, Tinker Bell has been featured at the introduction)...
Tinker Bell definitely has a cool look, and as the legend goes, Marilyn Monroe was used as the visual inspiration for Tinker Bell. Disney films historically often DID use real life people as the visual models for characters (I did a Movie Legends Revealed about the multiple people who were used to be the visual inspiration for Ariel in The Little Mermaid, including sitcom star, Alyssa Milano), so it's a normal thing to believe, and the timing works out very well, as Marilyn Monroe was a major star by the time that Disney's animators got around to creating Peter Pan.
But is it true?
WAS TINKER BELL VISUALLY INSPIRED BY MARILYN MONROE?
One of the problems is that thing I noted earlier about how Monroe got to be a shorthand reference for "blonde bombshells," but the simple fact of the matter is that blonde bombshells were already a thing well before Marilyn Monroe came on to the scene. In fact, Monroe had her hair dyed blonde specifically to make her look like ANOTHER actress, the grear Rita Hayworth, so the blonde bombshell concept was a very common one at the time. It's just that the other blonde bombshells of the time have all faded into obscurity (Kathleen Crowley was an early TV blonde bombshell who would do, like, 22 guest spots a year in the 1950s, but she has long fallen out of the public consciousness), so when we see a character like Tinker Bell who seems to be based on that blonde bombshell idea, then Monroe becomes the obvious choice.
However, in reality, the model for Tinker Bell was actor, dancer and model Margaret Keery.
Keery, who just turned 93 years old in May 2022, reflected on her original audition for the role, "I got a call for an audition for a three-and-a-half-inch fairy who didn't talk. I thought to myself, How do you audition for something like that? That night, I played myself [a record of instrumental music], and I choreographed the fairy making breakfast. I think that the executives were taken aback, so they said, 'We want her to land on Wendy's dresser top, measure her hips, and be unhappy with the results.' I did it, and what do you know? I received a call saying, 'We'd like you to come to work next Tuesday!'"
As you can see, there are still a number of reference photos remaining from Keery's original depiction as Tinker Bell, with her interacting with oversized props of regular household items so that the animators could see how a fairy would interact with these items, like a jewelry box lock...
So no, Marilyn Monroe was not the visual inspiration for Tinker Bell (nor was she the visual inspiration for Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, but those are more obviously false, as Monroe was not yet a star when those films were being designed).
The legend is...
STATUS: False
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