The Venerable Evelyn Venable: Disney’s Blue Fairy

Evelyn Venable (1913-1993) is one of those actresses whose work you likely know without knowing that you know it. Her obscurity can not be chalked up to being a bit player, or even a supporting player — she was more often than not the female lead in her films. It’s just that her footprint is small, not to say dainty. She appeared in scarcely more than two dozen pictures over a ten year period (1933-1943).

But if you’re a classic movie fan you likely know several of Vebanble’s movies, for they include such things as Death Takes a Holiday (1934) with Fredric March, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934), TheLittle Colonel (1935) with Shirley Temple, Alice Adams (1935) with Katharine Hepburn, the Stephen Foster bio-pic Harmony Lane(1935), My Old Kentucky Home (1938), and Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) in which modeled for, and provided the voice of the Blue Fairy. She was also, many believe, the model for the Columbia Pictures mascot.

In 1934, while working on the Will Rogers picture David Harum, Venable met cinematographer Hal Mohr, whom she married that year. Harum shot too many classic pictures to list; a very shortened “greatest hits” includes He Who Laughs Last (1925), The Jazz Singer (1927), The Cat Creeps (1930), A Midsummer Nights Dream (1935), Captain Blood(1935), Destry Rides Again (1939), the color remake of Phantom of the Opera (1943), and Fritz Lang’sRancho Notorious (1952), also in gorgeous Technicolor.

The brevity of Venable’s movie career seems to have more to do with her dissatisfaction with the industry than vice versa. Her last feature was the comedy He Hired the Boss (1943) with Stuart Erwin, a far cry from the Shakespearean roles she had played onstage opposite Walter Hampden, which had brought her to the attention of the studios in the first place. The daughter and granddaughter of important Ohio educators, after quitting the biz she herself became a professor of Greek and Latin at UCLA, and directed productions of Greek and Roman plays there. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.