Snow White (Disney character)
Originally, Disney could not find what they thought was a suitable voice for Snow White. Around 150 girls auditioned for the role of Snow White, including well-known actresses such as Deanna Durbin, whose voice seemed too old to Disney. One assistant to Disney called music teacher Guido Caselotti, complaining that Hollywood had no singing girls. Caselotti wanted to offer to send their best to listen to the students, but it turned out that his 20-year-old daughter Adriana overheard a conversation on another phone in the house, and she began to sing in a young girl's voice. Her father was confused and told his daughter to get away from the phone, but the casting director liked her voice and invited her to audition. After Walt Disney heard her, he immediately gave her the role. The studio signed a multi-page contract with Adriana Caselotti: she was forbidden to sing in a movie or on the radio before or after the movie premiered because Walt Disney did not want the voice of Snow White to be heard anywhere else. Instead, she received $970 (now worth approximately $).
Pierre Huyghe
In "Blanche-Neige", (1997), Huyghe revealed the face and story of Lucie Dolène, the French voiceover artist whom Walt Disney hired to do the French language version of "Snow White". When Disney subsequently reissued the film and used Dolmen's voice without her permission, she sued the company for the right to own her own voice. Huyghe's film is a simply edited headshot of Dolène recounting her experience in her unmistakable (to French ears) voice. "Blanche-Neige" was a more pointed followup to "Dubbing", (1996), in which Huyghe screens Steven Spielberg's film "Poltergeist" but focuses his camera on the fifteen actors who have been hired to do the French voiceovers rather than the projection of the film itself, which is only visible to the actors. In 1999, Huyghe and fellow French artist Philippe Parreno turned this idea of the subjective performance of language into the body of a fictional character by purchasing the rights to a manga figure whom they dubbed "Annlee". They then invited other artists including Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Joseph, Mélik Ohanian, Joe Scanlan, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce various works utilizing the character Annlee, the sum of which became the traveling group exhibition "No Ghost Just A Shell". After several exhibitions, they transferred the character's copyright to the Annlee Association—a legal entity owned by Annlee, thus ensuring her simultaneous freedom and death.