Obituary: June Foray, voice of Rocky and Natasha on ‘Bullwinkle Show’
June Foray, an actress of a thousand voices, who portrayed Rocky the flying squirrel and the fiendish spy Natasha Fatale on the wickedly satirical animated adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle in the 1960s and myriad other animated creatures and characters on television and film, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 99.
Her niece Lauren Marems confirmed the death.
Ms. Foray began her remarkable 85-year career playing an elderly woman in a radio drama in 1929 at age 12. She portrayed scores of radio characters in the 1930s and ’40s. Over the next 60 years, she provided voices for animated shorts, feature films and television shows, as well as record albums, video games, even talking toys. Her last performance was as Rocky in a 2014 Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon produced by DreamWorks Animation.
Often compared to Mel Blanc, the cartoon virtuoso who supplied the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, Ms. Foray cackled, chirped, meowed and sometimes sang her way through nearly 300 animated productions, often playing several parts at once with quick shifts of accent, dialect and personality. Her work, unlike that of Blanc, was often uncredited, particularly in her early years.
But her output was prodigious. While she was not well known to the general public, the entertainment world called her the First Lady of Animated Voicing. At 94, she became the oldest person to win an Emmy, cited for her Mrs. Cauldron on “The Garfield Show,” and in 2013 she received an Emmy Governors Award.
“June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc,” said Chuck Jones, the legendary animator who proposed her star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. “Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.”
On the big screen, she was Lucifer the cat in Walt Disney’s “Cinderella” (1950), a mermaid and a squaw in “Peter Pan” (1953), and Wheezy Weasel and Lena Hyena in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988). On television, she was Cindy-Lou Who in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966); Ursula in “George of the Jungle” (1967); and Aunt May Parker in “SpiderMan and His Amazing Friends” (1981-83).
She also breathed sinister spirit into a doll in a memorable 1963 “Twilight Zone” episode, telling a little girl’s stepfather, played by Telly Savalas, “My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.”
Ms. Foray portrayed grannies, witches, a fortuneteller, innocent girls, sultry femmes and menageries of anthropomorphic chipmunks, cats, woodpeckers, mice, beagles and other cartoon characters in the adventures of Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Mr. Magoo, Sylvester and Tweety, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, the Incredible Hulk, the Smurfs and the Simpsons.
But the cognoscenti said she was at her peak for Rocket J. Squirrel (aka Rocky the flying squirrel) and his curvaceous adversary, Natasha Fatale, on the proudly two-dimensional cliffhanger chronicles of “Rocky and His Friends” (later “The Bullwinkle Show”) from 1959 to 1964. In other segments, she played Nell Fenwick, the prim girlfriend of the handsome, muddleheaded Mountie Dudley Do-Right.
In an era when the Cold War was heating up and the Red scare turned everyone blue, the gifted voices of Ms. Foray, Bill Scott, Paul Frees and William Conrad gave vivacity to Rocky, a plucky little rodent with an aviator helmet, and his antlered, dimwitted moose pal (Scott) as they battled the inept Slavic schemers Boris Badenov (Frees) and Natasha in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, a neverland where silliness and puns live forever.
There was plenty of action for the children, slam-bang stories with standard animation gags like characters blowing up or falling out of windows. But on another level, it was satire, parody and rapid-fire wordplay.
“If you can’t believe what you read in the comic books,” Rocky asks, “what can you believe?”
The Russified Natasha, a villain of many slinky disguises, appears as an Indian princess, Bubbling Spring That Runs in the Meadow. “Call me Bubbles,” she purrs.
After 150 episodes, first on ABC and then on NBC, the series, created by Jay Ward and written by Scott and others, was canceled. But it had a huge cult following. Network reruns aired until 1973 and again in 1981-82. Cable reruns ran through the 1990s. Tributes were held at film festivals. The Walt Disney Co. bought videocassette rights for $1 million.
PBS produced a documentary, “Of Moose and Men: The Rocky and Bullwinkle Story” (1991), and Ms. Foray provided the voice of Rocky again in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” (2000), a feature that combined live action and computer animation. (Rene Russo played Natasha.)
“It seems we’re going to corrupt another generation,” Ms. Foray told the New York Times.
June Lucille Forer was born in Springfield, Mass., on Sept. 18, 1917, to Maurice and Ida Forer. A high school speech teacher with a radio program put her on the air.
After her family moved to Los Angeles, she wrote and acted all the parts on her own radio show, “Lady Make Believe,” as a teenager and was soon doing voice-overs for film studios. In the 1940s, she provided voices for a live-action series of film shorts called “Speaking of Animals” and appeared on radio shows starring Danny Thomas, Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante and the team of Phil Harris and Alice Faye.
She wrote two books: “Perverse, Adverse and Rottenverse” (2006), a collection of humorous essays, and “Did You Grow Up With Me, Too? The Autobiography of June Foray” (2009, with Mark Evanier and Earl Kress).
Providing voices for animation, she often said, was like putting on a radio play. The cast stood around microphones with scripts and a screen for visual cues, and played off one another: delivering gags, growls, swoons, screams, pauses for effect, cries of pain, angry rebukes, sweet endearments, coughs, shudders, sips, slurps, snickers, guffaws and an occasional sneeze.
She followed the scripts, but with her own interpretations, she told Tim Lawson and Alisa Persons for “The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who’s Who of Cartoon Voice Actors” (2004).
“I think it’s an intuition that you have,” she said, “that you can crawl into someone’s mind.”