Julie Bennett, 88, Los Angeles
Julie Bennett loved to regale friends with stories about her decades-long career as a character actor in TV’s Golden Age and as one of Hollywood’s most successful early female voiceover artists. She was the Southern-tinged voice for Jellystone Park resident Cindy Bear in “The Yogi Bear Show” TV cartoon in the 1960s and ’70s, and when Mattel’s Talking Barbie doll spoke, it was Bennett’s voice that children heard.
On TV, Bennett appeared in sketches with entertainers including Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and the married comedy duo George Burns and Gracie Allen, and she did guest spots on “Leave It to Beaver” and the original “Superman” series. “She was one of the last throwbacks to that era,” said her agent, Mark Scroggs, who remembered that Bennett never went out without her hair, makeup and wardrobe just right. “She was kind of old-glam Hollywood.”
Bennett, who had been living in an assisted living facility in Hollywood, died on March 31 of complications from COVID-19. She was 88.
Scroggs, who became her agent in 1997, practically adopted Bennett as a member of his family, often inviting her to his house in Burbank for dinner. To entertain the family last Thanksgiving, she suddenly broke into her Southernbelle voice for Cindy Bear, Scroggs said.
The voice-over work was especially lucrative for someone as versatile as Bennett.
She was in high demand, in particular for cartoons produced by the legendary animation studio Hanna-Barbera such as “Yogi Bear,” Scroggs said.
“In the voice-over world, there were only a handful of women who did that at the time, for shows like ‘The Flintstones,’ ‘The Jetsons’ and ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle,’ ” he said. “She loved entertainment — that was her life,” Scroggs said.
In her heyday at the dawn of the TV age in 1950s and throughout the ’60s and ’70s, “she would bounce from show to show,” he added. As a live-action actress, Bennett may have been less famous, but she found jobs plentiful in that arena too, appearing in TV series such as “The Donna Reed Show,” “Dragnet,” “Get Smart,” “Gunsmoke” and a sketchcomedy program about relationships, “Love, American Style.”
Bennett also starred in TV commercials and voiced the character of Aunt May in an animated “Spider-Man” series in the 1990s.
Bennett had her first brushes with the world of show business when she was a little girl.
An only child born in New York City, Bennett moved to L.A. with her family when she was 4 or 5, Scroggs said. One day while her father, a real estate agent, was doing business with powerful clients in Beverly Hills with Bennett at his side, they met Judy Garland, who kept Bennett distracted with a board game. Scroggs recalls Bennett telling him about many other stars she’d met, both in L.A. and in New York, where she briefly worked as an actress in the theater.
“Dean Martin was very nice, but Jerry Lewis was mean to her,” Scroggs recalled her confiding to him once. In the 1980s, Bennett branched out into managing other entertainers, using the name Marianne Daniels for that side of her career, Scroggs said.
Her first love was always performing. One of Bennett’s biggest — and weirdest — jobs was as a voice-over performer in
Woody Allen’s 1966 directorial debut, “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?,” a film in which campy, English-language dialogue was dubbed over a Japanese spy movie.
Scroggs says he watched the movie with Bennett in February. It was one of the last times he was able to enjoy her company before she fell ill in late March. She died a week after being admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Bennett wasn’t married and she didn’t have any children.
Scroggs says he was grateful to have welcomed her into his family, and for the chance in recent months to listen to her relive some of her adventures from the bygone days of Hollywood.