Her plight gained attention earlier this year when she was unable to find a suitable bone marrow donor and several entertainers, including Alicia Keys, Rihanna and 50 Cent, appealed to their fans to register as potential donors.

Image Shannon Tavarez as Nala. Credit... Jenny Anderson/Disney

In August she had an umbilical-cord blood transplant, a procedure in which stem cells harvested from a donated umbilical cord are injected into the patient to encourage the formation of a new, healthy blood system.

“It has a good survival rate and it’s the next best thing” to a marrow transplant, said Katharina Harf, a co-founder and executive vice president of DKMS Americas, a bone marrow donor center.

Minorities are vastly underrepresented in the bone marrow donor registry, which makes suitable donors for minority patients difficult to locate. In addition, blacks and Hispanics have many more different tissue types than whites, Ms. Harf said, which makes the process of matching donor to patient more complex, especially for patients of mixed race or ethnicity. Shannon’s father is Hispanic and her mother, Odiney Brown, is black.

Shannon Skye Tavarez was born on Jan. 20, 1999. In “The Lion King” she played young Nala, a lion cub who was the best friend of Simba, the show’s lead character. She was chosen for the part after auditioning along with hundreds of other children at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in December 2008 and made her debut in September 2009.