Not many people remember Virginia Davis. Her main career work began 86 years ago. But she was the first Disney star, and it was she — not Mickey Mouse — who launched the Walt Disney empire.

Walt Disney was in Kansas City, not Hollywood, and his Laugh-O-gram Films was turning out silent animated cartoon shorts, which found some local popularity. He conceived the idea in 1923 of combining a live-action little girl with animated animals — a technically challenging feat for the era — in a comedy called “Alice’s Wonderland” (incidentally, this was not the first live action/ animation hybrid; Windsor McCay did it with his “Gertie the Dinosaur” several years earlier).

Disney needed a little girl of about four years of age, and spotted a young girl with a sweet face and blond ringlets, Virginia Davis, in an advertisement on screen at a local theater.

Davis was hired to make the comedy short, “Alice’s Wonderland,” and on the basis of this film Disney was able to secure distribution for many more silent “Alice Comedies,” despite his Laugh-O-gram Films going bust. Disney, Davis and a few others relocated to Hollywood and started up business again in the Disney Brothers Studios. The “Alice” movies were Disney’s first commercial successes.

Virginia Davis would star in the first 13 “Alice Comedies,” but her mother got into a dispute with the Disney brothers over compensation for Virginia’s further films, and Disney replaced her with other child actresses to play the role of Alice in dozens of additional shorts.

The “Alice” series ended in 1927. The following May, Disney launched a new animated character in a silent film called “Plane Crazy”: Mickey Mouse. In November 1928, Mickey appeared in the first animated cartoon with sound, “Steamboat Willie,” and the rest of the Disney story is history.

But a part of that history long forgotten by the public was Virginia Davis and the “Alice Comedies.” Davis, who died last week at the age of 90, went on to play other child-actress roles, work for the Disney Studios out of high school in their ink-and-paint department, marry naval aviator Robert McGhee, have kids and become an interior designer, a magazine editor and a real estate agent.

But as Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew and Director Emeritus with the Walt Disney Company said, “She liked to remind everyone that it all started with Alice, not Mickey Mouse.”

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