June Foray on voicing  Rocky  and  Natasha  on  The Bullwinkle Show    EMMYTVLEGENDS
Channel: MØůh'ãmEd Dhi'ã
Date: 2017-07-27

Foray worked for Disney, Walter Lantz, Hanna-Barbera and Rankin/Bass; in later years, the-then industry legend popped up in “The Simpsons,” “The Powerpuff Girls” and “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.” She played straight roles in her time, but she was a comedian primarily.

Much of her work was ostensibly "for children.” At the same time, she was the favored female performer of brainy talents like Stan Freberg (hear her as Queen Isabella and Betsy Ross on the album “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One”), producer Jay Ward (in various versions of “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” in “George of the Jungle” and “Fractured Flickers”) and animator Chuck Jones, who used her in Warner Bros. shorts but also as Cindy Lou Who in his "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and as multiple characters in "The Phantom Tollbooth."

It is possible to be sure that I have heard Foray, whose credits all told run into the hundreds, and not recognized her. Yet just as screen stars are typically visible within the parts they play, great voice actors carry themselves from role to role – they are chameleons, but only up to a point. The actor stretches, dresses her sound appropriate to the part, the way a live-action actor will change her hair or wear a fake nose.

June Foray was the voice both of Natasha Fatale and Rocky the Flying Squirrel on "The Bullwinkle Sho
June Foray was the voice both of Natasha Fatale and Rocky the Flying Squirrel on "The Bullwinkle Show." (Jay Ward Productions)
Screen credits were few; Foray, like most of her voice-work colleagues, was for most of her life anonymous to anyone but the fans. But even for those who can’t place the names — Foray, Mel Blanc, Paul Frees, Frank Oz, Bea Benaderet — the voices will be familiar.

What made her distinctive? There is a quality of youthfulness even in older characters, like Granny or Witch Hazel, a playfulness that cuts through the phlegm. She had range, literally, going low for Natasha, the semi-seductive Pottsylvanian spy, and high for Rocky, boy squirrel and skeptical hero. Witch Hazel, she said, she made "not evil at all."

Working into her 90s — she was awarded her first Emmy at 94, for “The Garfield Show” — she never sounded her age. The clock might have argued otherwise, but it was an argument Foray won, until the clock ran out.