July 3 - Marcellite Garner

Image courtesy wikipedia.com

On this day, in 1910, Edna Marcellite Garner was born in Redlands, California. She enrolled in night classes to study art at Polytechnic High School, the second oldest high school in Los Angeles, California. Right after she graduated she applied for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. At the age of nineteen, Marcelitte became one of only 35 Disney employees in February 1930 as part of the Ink and Paint Department. She’d been there about six months when Burt Gillett, one of the directors of Mickey Mouse shorts, walked in and asked if any of the girls (Ink and Paint was staffed entirely by women) knew how to speak Spanish. Marcellite and one other woman raised their hands. Burt asked if either of them could sing. The other woman wasn’t willing to do that and put her hand down. Burt looked at Marcellite, said follow me and took her to the recording studio for a sound test. She passed and became the first regular voice of Minnie Mouse.

Image copyright Disney

Starting with The Cactus Kid in 1930 (it’s set in Mexico, thus the reason for the Spanish question), Marcellite would lend her voice to Miss Minnie for over 40 shorts in the next ten years. You can hear her in such classics as Mickey’s Orphans, Mickey’s Rival, Brave Little Tailor and The Nifty Nineties. She is generally credited with helping to develop Minnie’s personality beyond eye candy for Mickey.  Marcellite also provided various other voices and sounds for the Silly Symphony series, like cats meowing in the Academy Award winning Three Orphan Kittens.

When the Great Animator’s Strike happened in 1941, Marcellite’s sympathies lay with the studio not the animators. She couldn’t see how anyone was being mistreated and felt the strike was ruining the family vibes of the studio. Her main contribution to the strike actually came about quite casually. She took some color home movies of the workers walking the picket line; nowadays, whenever footage of the strike is shown, it’s almost always her work you’re seeing. Though the strike was soon settled, Marcellite wouldn’t be around for much longer. Later that year, she retired from Disney in order to focus her efforts on raising her two kids with her husband, Richard Wall.

Image courtesy cartoonbrew.com

In later years, when the Wall family had moved to Los Gatos, California, Marcellite did briefly re-enter the entertainment industry, producing a comic strip called El Gato for the local paper. Throughout her life she continued to expand her artistic skills, taking classes in ceramics, watercolor and oils. She made all sorts of pieces for friends and family, selling a handful in art galleries or at local festivals, but she never did any more voice acting after leaving Disney. Until that is, archived recordings of her were used to create Get a Horse!, the short released before Frozen in 2013. Unfortunately, Marcellite hadn’t lived long enough to hear herself as Minnie again. Horse hit theaters two decades after she passed away at her home in Grass Valley, California on July 26, 1993. She was 83.