Aurora (Disney) welcomed Costa by asking her to perform a bird call, which she did successfully. However, being from Knoxville, Tennessee, Costa's strong southern accent nearly prevented her from being cast until she proved that she could sustain a fake British accent for the entire film. The filmmakers likened the situation to English actress Vivien Leigh successfully feigning a southern accent for her role as Scarlet O'Hara in the film "Gone With the Wind" (1939). Within hours of her audition, Walt Disney himself contacted Costa via telephone to offer her the job, which she immediately accepted. Aurora became Costa's first major film
Gone with the Wind (film) of the "limit" put on black aspiration by old prejudices. Malcolm X later recalled that "when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug". Upon its release, "Gone with the Wind" broke attendance records everywhere. At the Capitol Theatre in New York alone, it was averaging eleven thousand admissions per day in late December, and within four years of its release had sold an estimated sixty million tickets across the United States—sales equivalent to just under half the population at the time. It repeated its success overseas, and was a sensational hit during the Blitz