June Foray - Acting Career

Acting Career

In the 1940s, she also began film work, including a few appearances acting in live-action movies, but mostly doing voiceovers for animated cartoons and occasionally dubbing films and television.

For Walt Disney, she played Lucifer the Cat in the feature film Cinderella, Lambert's mother in Lambert the Sheepish Lion, a mermaid in Peter Pan and Witch Hazel in animated shorts; decades later, Foray would be the voice of Grandmother Fa in Disney's 1998 Mulan. She also did a variety of voices in Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker cartoons. For Warner Brothers Cartoons, she was Granny (whom she has played, on and off, since 1955, taking over for Bea Benaderet), owner of Tweety and Sylvester, and, memorably, a series of witches, including Looney Tunes' own Witch Hazel, for director Chuck Jones.

She voice acted on The Smurfs as Jokey Smurf and Mother Nature; voiced Ursula on George of the Jungle; and on How the Grinch Stole Christmas voiced Cindy Lou Who, asking "Santa" why he's taking their tree. She was the voice of the original "Chatty Cathy" doll.

She voiced evil characters as well, such as the "Talky Tina" doll in The Twilight Zone episode ("Living Doll") as well as all the female roles in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975), including the villainous cobra Nagaina.

Foray worked for Hanna-Barbera, including on The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Jetsons and many other shows. She has done extensive voice acting for Stan Freberg's commercials, albums and 1957 radio series, memorably as secretary to the werewolf advertising executive. Foray has also appeared in several Rankin/Bass TV specials in the 1960s and 1970s, voicing the young Karen in the TV special Frosty the Snowman (although only her singing parts remained in later airings, after Rankin-Bass reedited the special a few years after it debuted, with Foray's speaking parts re-dubbed with an uncredited voice).

For Jay Ward: she played nearly every female on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, including Natasha Fatale and Nell Fenwick, as well as male lead character Rocket J. Squirrel (a.k.a. Rocky Squirrel). Foray also voiced May Parker in "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends" from 1981-1983, as well as Magica De Spell and Ma Beagle in the televised cartoon DuckTales. In the later part of her career, she had a leading role voicing Grammi Gummi on the television series Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, working with her Rocky and Bullwinkle co-star Bill Scott until his death in 1985. Around 2003, she was a guest star in an episode of Powerpuff Girls. IIn October 2006, she portrayed Susan B. Anthony on three episodes of the podcast The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd.

Chuck Jones is reported to have said, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc, Mel Blanc was the male June Foray."

In 1995, ASIFA-Hollywood, a chapter of the Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (the International Animated Film Association), established the June Foray Award, which is awarded to "individuals who have made a significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation." Foray was the first recipient of the award. In 2007, Foray became a contributor to ASIFA-Hollywood's Animation Archive Project.

In 2007, Britt Irvin became the first person ever to voice a character in a cartoon remake that had been previously voiced by Foray in the original series when she started voicing the character Ursula (Foray's former character) in the new George of the Jungle cartoon series on the Cartoon Network. In 2011, Roz Ryan voiced Witch Lezah (Hazel spelled backwards) in The Looney Tunes Show, opposite June Foray.

Foray guest-voiced only once on The Simpsons, in the season-one episode "Some Enchanted Evening", as the receptionist for the Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service. This was a play on a Rocky & Bullwinkle gag years earlier in which none of the cartoon's characters, including narrator William Conrad, was able to pronounce "rubber baby buggy bumpers" unerringly. Foray was later homaged in The Simpsons, in the season-eight episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", in which the character June Bellamy is introduced as the voice behind both Itchy and Scratchy. She was voiced by series regular Tress MacNeille, though her "Itchy" and "Scratchy" voices were performed by Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer, respectively.

Foray appeared on camera in a major role only once, in Sabaka as a high priestess of a fire cult. She also appeared on camera in an episode of Green Acres as a Mexican telephone operator. In 1991, she provided her voice as the sock-puppet talk-show host Scary Mary on an episode of Married... with Children. She played gag cameos in both 1992's Boris & Natasha and 2000's The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Another on-camera appearance was in the 1984 TV sitcom The Duck Factory, which starred Jim Carrey and Don Messick.

She was often called for ADR voice work for television and feature films. This work included dubbing the voice of Mary Badham in The Twilight Zone episode "The Bewitchin' Pool" and the voices for Sean and Michael Brody in some scenes of the film Jaws. June Foray also dubbed several people in Bells Are Ringing, Diana Rigg in some scenes of The Hospital, Robert Blake in a drag in an episode of Baretta and a little boy in The Comic.