Margaret Kerry, the actress and dancer who served as the live-action inspiration for Walt Disney’s beloved Tinker Bell and who charmed generations of fans with stories of her pixie-dusted career, has died at the age of 97. She passed away on June 11, 2026, in Wilmington, North Carolina, of lung cancer.
Born Peggy Lynch in Springfield, Illinois on May 11, 1929, she was adopted at the age of three and moved to Los Angeles, where her performing life began almost immediately. Her very first role came at age six, as a fairy in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fitting beginning for someone who would one day embody the most famous fairy of all. As a child she danced and acted in three of the Our Gang comedy shorts under her birth name.
Her path through early Hollywood was a colorful one. She served as a camera double for Elizabeth Taylor in MGM’s National Velvet, and caught the eye of entertainer Eddie Cantor, who cast her as his teenage daughter in If You Knew Susie. It was Cantor who decided she needed a more memorable, theatrical name, and so Peggy Lynch became Margaret Kerry. A bright student as well as a working actress, she graduated high school with honors and later earned her degree cum laude from Los Angeles City College.
The role that would define her legacy came when she answered an audition call during the planning of Disney’s animated Peter Pan. Supervised by famed animator Marc Davis, the audition asked her to pantomime the movements that would guide the animation of Tinker Bell. Because the character was to be silent, her physicality had to carry everything, and Davis wanted a dancer who could give the fairy life. Kerry won the part and spent six months on a nearly empty soundstage acting out the role, working with oversized props including a giant keyhole and enormous scissors for the scene in which Tinker Bell is trapped in a jewelry box. She also provided the reference movements and voice for the red-haired mermaid in the Neverland lagoon.
Tinker Bell was far from her only contribution to animation. A gifted voice artist with a reported twenty-one dialects and forty-eight character voices, Kerry voiced characters including Paddlefoot and Spinner across 52 episodes of the pioneering children’s series Clutch Cargo, and lent her talents to The New Three Stooges and Space Angel. On screen she played Sharon in The Ruggles, the first network sitcom, and appeared in The Andy Griffith Show and The Lone Ranger.
Later in life she found a second calling in Christian radio, producing and hosting What’s Up Weekly on Los Angeles station KKLA-FM from the early 1990s into the 2000s, where she also led a community outreach program connecting with more than 200 nonprofit agencies. She remained a warm and constant presence in the animation and Disney fan communities, serving on the board of ASIFA-Hollywood and delighting fans at conventions across the country well into her nineties. In 2016 she published her memoir, Tinker Bell Talks: Tales of a Pixie Dusted Life, and later wrote candidly about living with prosopagnosia, or face blindness.
Her life held one more fairy-tale chapter. In 2019, at the age of 90, she reconnected with a former boyfriend, WWII veteran Robert Boeke, after seven decades apart. The two married on Valentine’s Day in 2020. Boeke died on May 24, 2026, at the age of 100, less than three weeks before Kerry’s own passing.
Honored over the years by the City of Los Angeles, the Disneyana Fan Club, and the Walt Disney Family Museum, where her original Tinker Bell ballet slippers went on display in 2023, Margaret Kerry leaves behind a legacy stitched into one of the most enduring images in animation history. Every time Tinker Bell flutters across the screen trailing pixie dust, a little of her lives on.