It’s a lie they tell you as a kid; Mel Blanc did not do the voices of all the Looney Tunes characters. Oh, he did most of them, but for many years, when the fine folks at the Warner animation studio needed a female voice, they called on June Foray, who is still alive at the probable age of ninety-eight. (IMDb lists four different birth years and appears to have settled on 1917.) She also worked for pretty much everyone else at one point or another.
When I was a kid, my grandparents used to take one of us for a few weeks every summer, alternating me and my sisters. One summer when I was the one staying with them, I used to get up early in the morning to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle. I’m not sure if I knew then that Rocky, Natasha, and Nell Fenwick were all voiced by the same person, though I’ve always known that Rocky was voiced by a woman. Anyway, hers is a voice I’ve known for so long that I honestly don’t know what the first thing I knew her from was. Probably Granny or Witch Hazel, but maybe Rocky and the others.
She has approximately three hundred credits on IMDb, though there may be some overlap there, as various of the shorts with which she’s credited may also appear elsewhere as specials and so forth. On the other hand, that only counts each TV series once, and among other things, she voiced Jokey Smurf 167 times. (Smurfette, if you’re curious, was voiced by Lucille Bliss; they voiced mermaids together in the Disney animated Peter Pan, too.) Generations of children grew up with June Foray’s voice.
The fact that June Foray has not received more awards for her work is proof that people don’t take voice acting seriously. So okay, Granny and Witch Hazel sound vaguely alike, but neither of them sound much like Natasha Fatale. Or Jokey Smurf. Nagaina. Lucifer the Cat. Okay, maybe Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, whom Foray voiced once; I’ve never actually seen an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short. There is a difference between voice acting and voice cameos, and let’s face it, there’s a reason the Annie Awards have named an award after her.
She does appear to have retired in the last few years, though I wouldn’t count on it. She has been working since 1929, when she got her start in radio; she is even listed as a writer for some of the radio work she did. For those of you doing math, she was twelve. I think possibly it gives her the longest career of anyone we’ve covered thus far, beating even Olivia De Havilland and Kirk Douglas. Though I will confess that more people would recognize them if they saw them.
