When you sit down and read June Foray’s work biography, most people will take a tour through decades of beloved programs. Even if you weren’t born in the decades June did most of her work, you definitely heard her voice in reruns, she was just that prolific. The regular public wouldn’t know her name, but in the entertainment world she was well known for her extensive and diverse body of work. Her work was often compared to Mel Blanc, a virtuoso in his own right, but Chuck Jones, the legendary animator is often quoted as saying
“June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc.
Mel Blanc is the male June Foray.”
June’s work started very early in life, landing her on the radio at age 12, voicing an old woman. She was born in 1917 in Massachusetts, to a Jewish immigrant father and a Jewish descent mother. June’s speech teacher had a radio program on a local station, and gave June some of her first experiences. Eventually her family moved to Los Angeles, and June continued her radio work there. By age 15 she had created her own radio program called “Lady Makebelieve” for which she was both writing and providing voices.
June said about her early life,”My mother and father were artistic people. My mother was a singer and a pianist. They enjoyed the opera and the theater and movies. And so they would take us kids to all of the wonderful functions at the Bijou Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wanted to be a stage actress. Then I could come home and impersonate all these people I had seen in the movies. I was an omnivorous reader as well. So, I memorized a lot of classics. The little old lady that I do actually with Tweety and Sylvester, I memorized lines from “The Old Woman Shows Her Medals”. It’s a play by J.M. Barrie. Oh my goodness, I just did so many impersonations of stars, and read William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde and “The Importance of Being Ernest”. It was a very exciting life.”
As she got older, she worked steadily in radio and stepped into on camera work from time to time, but her real expertise was in dialects, accents, and just voices in general. She worked for Disney as Lucifer the cat in Cinderella, for Hanna Barbera in the Jetsons and many other shows, the character of Granny in the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and both Rocky and Natasha in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. Writing out her entire bio would be beyond the scope of this article, but scrolling through it is a who’s who of animation through the decades.
Unfortunately, much of this work is uncredited, despite it’s breadth. June herself said “There were never any credits for voices. Walter Lantz was the first one who ever gave actors credit. And now that I think about it, and I look back and see these films I think ‘Who did this? Who did that? I wonder who did it?’ And I think everybody else feels the same way, and it’s a shame. All the in-betweeners, the animators, the directors, the writers, everybody got credit, but the actors didn’t. I guess we weren’t that important. Except we were.”
And of course she was right. The actors are important. Not only for her fellow voice talent whom she could inspire with her example and talent, but also for the generations of children who grew up with her voice but without knowing her name.
Bringing June onto Rocky and Bullwinkle was a fine example of the impact of her voice. Although the younger generations may not be as familiar with the antics of that Moose and Squirrel, the show had a cult following and was in reruns for years.
June said about her hiring for that show, “I had already been working at Disney and Warner Brothers, doing a multiplicity of voices. Jay Ward and Bill Scott had this wonderful idea of a moose and a squirrel. My agent called and said, ‘Have you ever heard of Jay Ward?’ and I said ‘No’. He said, ‘Well, he wants to take you to lunch.’ Jay knew precisely whom he wanted. Nobody ever auditioned. He just said, ‘I want June Foray’.”
And he had her for both the villainous Natasha and the chipper and charming Rocky.
Rocky was a naive flying squirrel, who like Bullwinkle was often fooled by the costumes Boris and Natasha would wear, but the two heroes would always win out in the end. Interestingly, Rocky’s flight abilities started out only like gliding-as a real flying squirrel would-and ended with him able to fly like an airplane or Superman and stay airborne for long periods. The show would have fans and laughter for many years to come, despite having only 150 episodes.
A major part of June’s life was her love of and support for animation. In the 1960’s she began a chapter of the International Animated Film Association in Hollywood, and later came up with the Annie Awards in 1972 because there were no awards specifically the celebration for animation. In 2007, she participated in the Association’s archive project for cartoon voices. She also sat on the Governor’s board of the motion picture association for two decades, lobbying for an animation-specific award to be added to the Academy Awards. In 2001, they added The Academy Award for Best Animated feature in response to her petitioning.
June also had a lot to say about the modern trend of putting “big names” in animated movies to gain viewers. “We are all doing supplementary parts while Cameron Diaz is getting paid $10 million. The stars receive millions of dollars for doing voices for animated films, and then there is the poor actor who has to struggle to make at least $15,000 a year just to keep his benefits. A lot of the young people–wonderful, good, solid voice actors–have families and are buying homes, and work is bad for them. Frankly, I don’t think simply because a star’s name is on it that is going to sell the film if it’s not good. You get big stars doing live-action films, and if it’s a flop, their appearance doesn’t alter the basic outcome.”
Like many actors from the golden age of animation, June worked until almost the end of her life. She continued to work on some of her classic roles in new shows, like the character of Granny from Looney Tunes, and many other roles. In 2015, June suffered injuries in a car accident, and her health declined until her death in 2017. She was 99 years old, and was less than two months before her 100th birthday.
I invite you to revisit some of June’s work, and share it with those in your life who may not know the story about the woman who brought so many iconic voices to life.