The longtime
Disney employee worked on 1937 hit
SNOW White and the Seven Dwarfs and remained with the studio for four decades
Ruthie Tompson, the last living link to the earliest days of Walt Disney’s animation studio has died aged 111. In a statement, the Walt Disney Company said Tompson had “passed away peacefully in her sleep” on Sunday at her home at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement complex in
Los Angeles.
Tompson was a longtime Disney employee who worked on the 1937 hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and remained with the company for four decades until the mid-1970s. Having got to know Walt and Roy Disney through working at a riding school in the San Fernando valley where the Disney brothers played polo, Tompson was offered a
Job as a painter on Disney’s first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which began production in 1934. She later recalled: “We worked into the night, day after day, until we got it exactly right!”