Margaret Kerry, the perky actress and dancer who served as the model and inspiration for the Disney animators creating the pixie Tinker Bell for the 1953 classic Peter Pan, has died. She was 97.
“It is with profound sadness that we share news of the passing of Margaret Kerry (Boeke), our beloved Tinker Bell,” said a family statement on Kerry’s Facebook page. “Margaret passed peacefully into the arms of Jesus on June 11, 2026, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her three adoring children, Ellen, Christina and Eric, were with her as she lost her courageous battle with lung cancer at the age of ninety-seven.”
The statement continued, “And remember, on any given night, look up into the night sky and search for that “Second Star to the Right”. Upon closer look, you might just notice that star shining a little brighter in Margaret’s honor.”
From 1949-52, Kerry starred as daughter Sharon Ruggles on the live ABC family sitcom The Ruggles, one of the first TV shows to emanate not from New York but from Hollywood. In the highly rated series finale, her character gets married and goes on her honeymoon.
As a voice actress, Kerry starred on Clutch Cargo in 1959, Space Angel in 1962-64 and Captain Fathom in 1965 — those cartoons used the Syncro-Vox system, with real human lips superimposed over the animated characters’ mouths — and on The New Three Stooges in 1965. She did live segments with Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita as well. All were for Cambria Productions, a company led by her first husband, Dick Brown.
The 5-foot-2 Kerry had starred alongside Eddie Cantor in If You Knew Susie (1948) and was an assistant dance director on the Gloria DeHaven musical I’ll Get By (1950) when her agent sent her to Disney Studios in Burbank to audition for Peter Pan, she recalled in a 2003 interview with Jim Korkis.
“They were looking for a young girl who was comfortable with dance movement,” she said. “How do you audition for animation and for a character who doesn’t speak? At home I had a room set up, my dance room, with all these mirrors and a barre. So I got this little record player and put on an instrumental record and worked up a pantomime [as a 9-year-old boy] making breakfast to the beat of the record; you know, carrying eggs and maybe dropping one, closing the refrigerator door with one foot, etc., as much variety of movement as I could do in the context of a little story.
“The next day I went to the studio and took the record player and put on this 45-rpm record and did this mime. I choreographed a whole 3 ½-minute routine to this old record.”
Kerry got the job, reported for work the next Tuesday and on and off for the next six to nine months, she moved around “a great big soundstage that seemed to go on forever” wearing her own one-piece bathing suit and her hair in a bun and being observed by Marc Davis (one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”) and other animators.
“There was no one for me to react to. I had to imagine almost everything,” she said. “There was an occasional prop like huge scissors or a wire-frame keyhole or something. Most of the time it was just me pretending to be looking up from under something or walking around.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
Starring Bobby Driscoll as Peter, Kathryn Beaumont as Wendy Darling and Hans Conried as Captain Hook, Peter Pan played in competition at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and was a big hit at the box office.
Later, Tinker Bell would become a mascot for Disneyland who sprinkled her magic pixie dust at the start of episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney.
“They liked the character that I came up with,” she said in a 2020 interview. “She’s feisty, and I call her beguiling. You love her if she’s very bad, and you love her if she’s very good.”
Margaret McCarty was born on May 11, 1929, in Springfield, Illinois. After her mother died during childbirth, her father was unable to care for their five children, and she and two siblings were put up for adoption. With her new parents, Fred and Grace, she was renamed Peggy Lynch, and the family moved to Los Angeles when she was 3.
She appeared as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) — she said after a studio light caught fire, Mickey Rooney “dragged me into this little two-inch deep stream on the set so I’d be safe from any flames” — and in Our Gang comedy shorts and took dancing lessons from Nico Charisse, husband of Cyd Charisse.
She showed up in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and The Star Maker (1939) and was a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944), then tap-danced and sang as the daughter of Cantor and Joan Davis’ characters in If You Knew Susie. It was Cantor who gave her the stage name Margaret Kerry.
During the making of the movie, in which Driscoll played her brother, she finished up at Benjamin Franklin Senior High School and would later graduate from Los Angeles City College.
After starring as a co-host/performer on the local TV show Tele-Teen Reporter, produced and hosted by Al Burton, Kerry landed on The Ruggles. The show starred Charlie Ruggles as her dad, Irene Tedrow and then Erin O’Brien-Moore as her mom, Tom Bernard as her brother Chuck and It’s a Wonderful Life actor Jimmy Hawkins and Judy Nuget as her twin siblings, Donald and Donna. The family home had one bathroom, making for all kinds of chaos.
The Ruggles ran for 137 episodes over about 32 months, with the cast doing one episode live for the East Coast, breaking for dinner and then doing another one live for the West Coast. “And we never heard of a cue card,” she said.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Kerry noted she had just won a “Most Beautiful Legs in Hollywood” contest when she went to work on Peter Pan.
“You remember the scene where [Tinker Bell] falls over backward in Wendy’s dresser drawer?” she asked Korkis. “Well, they had me falling over backward onto a mattress. The mattress was about a half-inch thick, or at least it seemed that thick, and I went over backward and went thud. The look of my face of surprise and pain was identical to the one Tink has in the finished film.”
Tinker Bell didn’t talk in the movie, but Kerry was heard — as the red-headed mermaid — and that kickstarted her voice-acting career.
Kerry also appeared on a 1950 episode of The Lone Ranger and on two first-season installments of The Andy Griffith Show, in 1960’s “Christmas Story” as Bess Muggins and in 1961’s “Andy Forecloses” as Helen Scobey.
More recently, she was a motivational speaker and a producer, writer and host of a program for a L.A.-based Christian radio station from 1992-2004. Her autobiography, Tinker Bell Talks: Tales of a Pixie Dusted Life, was published in 2016.
Kerry was married to Brown from 1951 until their 1984 divorce — he was a director on The Ruggles when they first met — and to John H. Willcox from 1987 until his 1999 death.
She then reconnected with Robert Boeke — a retired Mobil Oil exec and her boyfriend seven decades earlier— and married him on Valentine’s Day in 2020 (she had kept a bracelet he had given her all those years ago). He died on May 24, 2026.
Survivors include her children, Eric, Christina and Ellen.
Asked by Korkis what she thought when she saw Peter Pan for the first time, she replied: “Like everybody else, I was enchanted. It is such a happy film. When you look up on that screen, that’s me up there. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s been a blessing.”
