Voice behind Rocky the Squirrel dies

June Foray, a voice actress who portrayed croaky grandmothers, purring cats and the world’s most famous flying rodent — Rocket J. Squirrel, from “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” — in hundreds of animated movies, television series and commercials, died July 26 at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 99.

Her niece, Robin Thaler, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Few actors — or everyday, performance-adverse human beings, for that matter — maintained as much control over their voice as Foray, who received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010 and an honorary Emmy Award three years later.

She portrayed elderly women even as a child, going on the radio at 12 with the help of an acting teacher. In 2014, as a very senior citizen, she played the Looney Tunes role of Granny, owner of Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, with the same good-natured screeches and yawlps she used for the character a half-century earlier.

Foray, who stood less than 5 feet tall, played a number of diminutive characters, including Jokey Smurf on “The Smurfs” television series, cheery grandmas (among them Grandmother Fa, bearer of a lucky cricket in the 1998 Disney film “Mulan”) and sweet young children.

She was the voice of Mattel’s pull-string Chatty Cathy doll in the 1960s - and used a similarly friendly tone as Talky Tina, a murderous doll that springs to life in a 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Three years later, she made one of her most memorable performances as Cindy Lou Who, “who was no more than 2,” in Jones’s hit television adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”