June Foray (born June Lucille Forer; September 18, 1917 – July 26, 2017) was an American voice actress and radio personality, best known as the voice of such animated characters as Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick, Lucifer from Disney's Cinderella, Cindy Lou Who, Jokey Smurf, Granny from the Warner Bros. cartoons directed by Friz Freleng, Grammi Gummi from Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears series, and Magica De Spell, among many others.
Her career encompassed radio, theatrical shorts, feature films, television, comedy and children's recordings – particularly with Stan Freberg – video games, talking toys, and other media.
Foray was one of the early members of ASIFA-Hollywood, the society devoted to promoting and encouraging animation. She is credited with the establishment of the Annie Awards, as well as being instrumental in the creation of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame honoring her voice work in television.
Chuck Jones was quoted as saying: "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc was the male June Foray."
June Lucille Forer was born on September 18, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, one of three children of Ida (née Robinson, 1893–1975) and Morris Forer (1886–1958). Her mother was of Lithuanian Jewish and French Canadian ancestry, and her father was a Jewish emigrant from Odessa, Russian Empire. The family resided at 75 Orange Street, Forest Park. As a small child, Foray first wanted to be a dancer, so her mother sent her to local classes, but she had to drop out due to a case of pneumonia. Her voice was first broadcast in a local radio drama when she was 12 years old; by age 15, she was doing regular radio voice work.
Two years later, after graduating from Classical High School, she moved with her parents and siblings to live in Los Angeles, near Ida's brother, after Morris Forer, an engineer, fell on hard financial times.
After entering radio through the WBZA Players, Foray starred in her own radio series Lady Make Believe in the late 1930s. She soon became a popular voice actress, with regular appearances on coast-to-coast network shows including Lux Radio Theatre and The Jimmy Durante Show.
In the 1940s, Foray also began film work, including a few roles in live action movies, but mostly did voice over work for animated cartoons and radio programs and occasionally dubbing films and television. On radio, Foray did the voices of Midnight the Cat and Old Grandie the Piano on The Buster Brown Program, which starred Smilin' Ed McConnell, from 1944 to 1952. She later did voices on the Mutual Broadcasting System program Smile Time for Steve Allen. Her work in radio ultimately led her to recording for a number of children's albums for Capitol Records.
For Walt Disney, Foray voiced 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 the Donald Duck short Trick or Treat. Decades later, Foray was the voice of Grandmother Fa in the 1998 animated Disney film Mulan. She also did a variety of voices in Walter Lantz Productions' Woody Woodpecker cartoons, including Woody's nephew and niece, Knothead and Splinter. Impressed by her performance as Witch Hazel, in 1954 Chuck Jones invited her to work on Warner Bros. Cartoons. For Warner Bros., she was Granny (whom she had played on vinyl records starting in 1950, before officially voicing her in Red Riding Hoodwinked, released in 1955, taking over for Bea Benaderet), owner of Tweety and Sylvester, and a series of witches, including Looney Tunes' own Witch Hazel, with Jones as director. Like most of Warner Bros.' voice actors at the time (with the exception of Mel Blanc), Foray was not credited for her roles in these cartoons. She played Bubbles on The Super 6 and Cindy Lou Who, asking "Santa" why he's taking their tree, in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In 1960, she provided the speech for Mattel's original "Chatty Cathy" doll; capitalizing on this, Foray also voiced the malevolent "Talky Tina" doll in the Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll", first aired on November 1, 1963.
Foray worked for Hanna-Barbera, including on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Jetsons, The Flintstones and many other shows. In 1959, she auditioned for the part of Betty Rubble on The Flintstones and voiced the character in the original pilot episode, opposite Mel Blanc who voiced Betty's husband, Barney Rubble, but Bea Benaderet was eventually cast in the role; Foray described herself as "terribly disappointed" at not getting to play Betty. Foray eventually made a guest appearance on The Flintstones as the voice of Granny Hatrock in the episode "The Bedrock Hillbillies".
She did extensive voice acting for Stan Freberg's commercials, albums, and 1957 radio series, memorably as secretary to the werewolf advertising executive. She also appeared in several Rankin/Bass TV specials in the 1960s and 1970s, voicing the young Karen and the teacher in the TV special Frosty the Snowman (although only her Karen singing parts remained in later airings, after Rankin-Bass re-edited the special a few years after it debuted, with Foray's dialogue re-dubbed by an uncredited child actress, Suzanne Davidson). She voiced all the female roles in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975), including the villainous cobra Nagaina. She played multiple characters 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) for Jay Ward, and played Ursula on George of the Jungle; and also starred on Fractured Flickers.
In the mid-1960s, she became devoted to the preservation and promotion of animation and wrote numerous magazine articles about animation. She and a number of other animation artists had informal meetings around Hollywood in the 1960s, and later decided to formalize this as ASIFA-Hollywood, a chapter of the Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (the International Animated Film Association). She is credited with coming up with the idea of the Annie Awards in 1972, awarded by ASIFA-Hollywood, having noted that there had been no awards to celebrate the field of animation. In 1988, she was awarded the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award. In 1995, ASIFA-Hollywood 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. She was an enthusiastic member of the Los Angeles Student Film Institute advisory board and frequent host and/or presenter at its annual festivals. In 2007, Foray became a contributor to ASIFA-Hollywood's Animation Archive Project. She also had sat on the Governors' board for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and lobbied for two decades for the academy to establish an Academy Award for animation; the academy created the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001 from her petitioning.
In 2007, Britt Irvin became the first person to voice a character in a cartoon remake that had been previously played by Foray in the original series when she voiced Ursula in the new George of the Jungle series on Cartoon Network. In 2011, Roz Ryan voiced Witch Lezah (Hazel spelled backwards) in The Looney Tunes Show, opposite June Foray as Granny. Foray also voiced May Parker in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981–83), as well as Raggedy Ann on several TV movies, Grandma Howard on Teen Wolf, Jokey Smurf and Mother Nature on The Smurfs, and Magica De Spell and Ma Beagle in DuckTales. At the same time, she had a leading role voicing Grammi Gummi on Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, an animated series credited with kickstarting an era of dramatically increased artistic standards for television animation, working with her Rocky and Bullwinkle co-star Bill Scott until his death in 1985.
Foray guest starred 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, were able to pronounce "rubber baby buggy bumpers" unerringly. Foray was later homaged by The Simpsons, in the season eight episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", in which the character June Bellamy (voiced by Tress MacNeille) is introduced as the voice behind both Itchy and Scratchy. According to The Simpsons writer and producer Mike Reiss, Foray voiced a few parts at the first table read for The Simpsons in early 1989 "but she sounded too cartoony for our show".