She's a Piano Top and an Underwater Pen

Is it possible to pick a favourite voice of June Foray?

There are so many of them, and likely all kinds we have never heard because of the countless commercials she was hired to do.

It’s a treat to run into articles about her. She must have entertained millions of people so any recognition is welcome, especially in the 1950s and ‘60s when almost all voiceover people were anonymous (unless they appeared in cartoons).

Her first screen credit for animation came from Walter Lantz, despite her long career at Warner Bros. She worked for MGM, Format Films (The Alvin Show) and, well, I’ll stop there because long lists are the province of other places on the internet.

Here’s a short column from the Copley News Service that appeared in papers in 1963. Jay Ward would be interested to know he didn’t come up with Fractured Flickers. And Foray’s predecessor at Warners, Bea Benaderet, gets her name spelled wrong again.

ACTRESS PROFITABLY FATED TO BE HEARD, NOT SEEN
By DONALD FREEMAN
HOLLYWOOD, July 4 (CNS)—Although she would dearly love to be entrusted with a serious dramatic role, it is June Foray's enviable financial fate to be summoned whenever producers need the voice of a cat or a dog or a parrot. Or, for that matter, a visitor from the moon or a pen that's so happy to be writing under water or the evil Natasha on the "Bullwinkle" show or any of a hundred voices that comprise this gifted actress' repertoire.
This coming season, for instance, she will be heard as Bunny, girl friend to the title character in the new "Beetle Bailey" cartoon series.
She’ll be several voices on Hanna-Barbera's new "Fractured Flickers" show. And she'll be all kinds of voices on a variegated roll call of commercials, some of them easy assignments, some not so easy.
"But then, we voice people do have a certain—ah, artistic freedom," Miss Foray pointed out the other day. "They ask you to be the sound of the top of a piano being polished—who knows what the top of a piano sounds like? Who knows what a girl from the moon sounds like? In a word, we wing it."
• • •
MISS FORAY, A CHARMING package who stands about a whisper over five feet tall, is one of a handful of voice specialists in Hollywood, There are perhaps seven or eight performers available who can rattle off at least 10 voices each. In that department the list begins and virtually ends with such people as Mel Blanc, Alan Reed, Bea Benadaret [sic], Daws Butler, Paul Frees, Dave Barry and Jim Backus (who is, incidentally, the Little Old Winemaker) and Miss Foray herself. Because of this scarcity and the great demand for a diversity of voices, the pay is quite ample.
"Financially — let's face it — it is utterly fantastic," Miss Foray noted. "What does 'fantastic' mean? Well, if you make more money than the president of the United States that, to me, is fantastic. Back in radio I used to make a nice living wage but 15 years ago if someone would have said, 'June, you're gonna end up with a tax problem,' I'd have howled with idiot laughter."
• • •
RARELY ON TELEVISION does Miss Foray emerge as her own pert self although last season she did just that on an Arthur Godfrey special, demonstrating some of her voices. She has supplied six voices for "The Flintstones," for example, and all the female voices, from Natasha to Nel Fenwick, on the "Bullwinkle" show.
If duty calls, she can do the voices of cats, chickens, roosters, parrots, lambs, goats, donkeys, crows and on and on in the bird-animal kingdom. She does eerie sounds that would frighten Alfred Hitchcock.
Name a dialect and Miss Foray can rattle it off in any voice you ask—Irish, Cockney, Swedish, French, Russian, sectional accents from every section of the land from Southern to Brooklyn to Eastern to Texas.
Miss Foray herself is native to Springfield, Mass., and started in radio at age 12.
In private life, Miss Foray is married to the writer, Hobart Donovan.

June Foray is one of those people who makes me smile when I hear her voice and feel happier afterwards. That’s actually not a bad accomplishment for the top of a piano.