June Foray, whose voice baby boomers heard as often as their own mothers', died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 99.
Foray was perhaps best-known as the voice of Rocky J. Squirrel, the flying squirrel in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in the 1960s, in addition to the voice to hundreds of other animated characters.
Her death was confirmed in a post on Facebook by her close friend Dave Nimitz.
If you watched cartoons anytime in the past 70 years, you would've heard Foray. She and Mel Blanc dominated the craft in the animation industry. She also had live-action roles in TV and movies, even video games.
Besides Rocky, she also provided the voice for Natasha Fatale with her familiar Russian-inflected "Dahlink."
Foray also voiced Granny in the Looney Tunes' Tweety and Sylvester cartoons. She was the voice of Grandmother Fa in Disney's Mulan. She also was the voice behind Cindy Lou Who in the 1960s Dr. Seuss classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
She had memorable non-animation roles as well. She had an uncredited role as the voice of Talky Tina on an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963. It was a creepy version of Mattel's Chatty Cathy doll, which Foray also voiced. She was a one-woman sound effects machine. In the 1974 film Jaws, she provided the voices of children on the beach. On an episode of I Love Lucy, she mimicked a barking dog.
Foray began doing radio voice work during the Depression, at age 12, and went into vocal acting for the screen during World War II, according to Variety.
Foray was instrumental in the creation of the Academy Awards' animated feature category. She discussed it in an interview in The Dallas Morning News in 2000.
"It's extremely important because animation is such a part of people's lives and an animated film can never win against American Beauty," she told The News. "The actors would never vote for an animated film."
Foray was also one of the original members of the animation organization, ASIFA-Hollywood, and founder of the annual Annie Awards, for which she was the first recipient.
"We are all saddened by the news of June's passing," ASIFA-Hollywood executive director Frank Gladstone said in a statement on the ASIFA website. "Although it didn't come as a shock, it has really taken us back a bit."
Foray received an Emmy nomination in 2012, winning a Daytime Emmy for her work as Mrs. Cauldron on the Cartoon Network's The Garfield Show.
She started her show-business career when she was 12, performing on radio. In the late 1940s, she wrote children's stories and narrated them, even playing all the voices.
That led to a contract with Capitol Records, where she met Blanc and started providing voices. Walt Disney hired her to growl as a cat in Cinderella.
