"Two days later, Walt called. He wanted me to come over and have an interview. I gladly said 'Yes, anytime you say.' We met and talked for awhile and he said, 'How would you like to be Cinderella?'

"Ever since then, I never hesitate to do a favor for a friend."

By the time she met him, of course, Walt Disney was a giant in the animated-film industry, so "meeting him was kind of magical. As a young person, I loved all his films, and I loved 'Snow White' — and to be Cinderella!"

Woods went into the Disney studios and recorded the voice of Cinderella on and off over the next two years "I didn't work every day, of course. A few weeks would go by, and I'd work for several days.

"It took much longer to make (an animated) movie then, but I think the characters were so much softer and lovelier. The computerized way is wonderful, and they turn out so fast, but they don't have the softness of the hand-drawn characters. That's what I miss. All of the animators over there just had a touch with the human figures."

When she got the "Cinderella" role, Woods was already a radio regular, performing weekly on a program starring comic actors Eve Arden and Jack Carson, and subsequently, as she continued in radio and television, she worked with Garry Moore, Steve Allen and many others. "I was doing as much as I wanted to do at the time. I was a happy camper.

"I don't remember ever doing an audition in my life. Everything I got was through friends. I was not a real show-biz girl. I was there because I was lucky, not because I went after it, because I never knew what the rat race was all about."

When she married Shaughnessy, Woods was in her 30s, and she retired from performing to have children. She says she was quite content to let her husband be in show business while she stayed home. "I wouldn't say I left the business; I stopped working in the business. I had walked away from it, and I was so happy."

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E-mail: hicks@desnews.com