Collect this charming still image from Disney’s original 1959 animated film production of Sleeping Beauty, hand-signed and inscribed by Mary Costa, voice actor of Princess Aurora!
The image shows the enraptured Princess Aurora and Prince Philip, surrounded by birds and woodland creatures. The beauty and detail in the treatment of the sunlight, flora and fauna is remarkable.
Mary Costa has signed and inscribed the photo, in a beautiful flourished script, in black felt-tip. Ms. Costa has written:
With Love
Mary Costa
Princess Aurora
“Sleeping Beauty”
Freshly framed in a substantial gold frame with bright white matting, the framed size measures 17-3/4” in height x 14-3/4” width. Mary Costa’s signature has been examined and authenticated by Beckett Authentication Services, and Sleeping Beauty is accompanied by a Beckett Certificate of Authenticity.
SLEEPING BEAUTY, a now-legendary animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney, is based on the classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault. The 16th Disney animated feature film, it was released to theaters in 1959, and features the voice of Mary Costa, in its titular role, as the voice of Princess Aurora. The film's musical score and songs, featuring the work of the Graunke Symphony Orchestra under the direction of George Bruns, are arrangements or adaptations of numbers from the 1890 Sleeping Beauty ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
In 2019, Sleeping Beauty was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
MARY COSTA is an opera singer, performing as an operatic soprano, and actress. A recipient of the 2020 National Medal of Arts, one of Ms. Costa’s most notable film credits is providing the voice of Princess Aurora in the 1959 Disney animated film Sleeping Beauty, for which she was named a Disney Legend in 1999. Immediately following her audition for the role, Walt Disney called her personally within hours to inform her that the part was hers.
Following her operatic debut, Costa performed in 44 operatic roles on stages throughout the world, including Jules Massenet’s Manon at the Metropolitan Opera, Violetta in La Traviata at the Royal Opera House in London and the Bolshoi in Moscow, and Cunegonde in the London premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. For RCA, she recorded Musetta in La bohème, with the Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Among roles which she sang for the San Francisco Opera, she was Tytania in the American premiere of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ninette in the world premiere of Norman Dello Joio’s Blood Moon, and Anne Truelove in the San Francisco premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Violetta in La Traviata.
Jacqueline Kennedy asked Ms. Costa to sing at a memorial service for her husband, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, at the Los Angeles Sports Arena; and she sang for the inaugural concert of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.