Donnie Dunagan, who provided the voice of Bambi for the original Disney classic and starred alongside Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in two films before receiving three Purple Hearts as a U.S. Marine, has died. He was 92 years old.
Dunagan died Wednesday of lung cancer, author and film historian Tom Weaver reported.
The blond, curly-haired Dunagan had added a dose of sweetness to the 1939 Universal horror films. Son of Frankenstein And Tower of London when his mother answered a phone call from none other than Walt Disney himself at the family home in Westwood.
The studio head wanted the kid to “help his artist give a child’s expression to a deer,” Dunagan recalled in a 2025 interview, so he and his mother drove to the new Disney park in Burbank.
Soon after, Dunagan was put to work Bambi (1942), and he devoted more than a year to the animated film. In one of the film’s most moving sequences, his white-tailed character screams for his mother after being chased through the woods by a hunter.
“I remember it well,” he said in 2011. “When I was told to say, with some stress, ‘Mother…Mother,’ I must have not had the tone of fear that the story needed. A trainer, I think it was a nice lady at the studio, asked me how I would scream out loud if my own real mother was lost and in great danger. That made it easier.”
Bambi would be his seventh and final film.
During his quarter-century in the military, Dunagan said he never told anyone about his four years in Hollywood. “One of the greatest regrets of my life is not having the courage to tell my close friends in the Marine Corps that I had participated in Mr. Disney’s wonderful work,” he said.
Boris Karloff held Donnie Dunagan while Lionel Atwill watched 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein.”
Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Donald Roan Dunagan was born in San Antonio on August 16, 1934. He moved with his parents, Warren and Louise, to Memphis, and when he was 3 years old, he entered a tap dancing competition and won the $100 prize, a huge sum at the time. More importantly, an RKO talent scout was in the audience and he arranged for the Dunigans to travel to Los Angeles by train.
After an audition, the youngster made his big screen debut in Mother Carey’s Chickens (1938), directed by Rowland V. Lee and starring Anne Shirley, Ruby Keeler and Walter Brennan.
Lee then cast him as Peter von Frankenstein, the son of Baron Wolf von Frankenstein of Rathbone, in the second sequel to James Whale’s 1931 classic. During production, he often played checkers with Karloff, in full makeup and dressed as a monster. (He said he won four pieces once.)
At Lee’s Tower of Londonthe baby prince of Dunagan and Lady Mowbray (played by 7-year-old Joan Carroll) marry in an arranged marriage ceremony in St. John’s Chapel. Due to budget issues, the comedy scene was almost cut from the film.
“I think Basil Rathbone was responsible for my presence Tower of London“, he recalled in a 2004 interview. “He was angry because they kept cutting scenes from the script. Not angry like rednecks are – he was always a gentleman – but he was disturbed.
Dunagan also appeared in The forgotten woman in 1939, then presented himself to Vigil in the night (1940), directed by George Stevens, and Meet the jerk (1941) while working on Bambi until early 1941. (Bambi as a teenager was voiced by Hardie Albright.)
Dunagan said the hardest part Bambi “It was serious. I loved the studio. The people were so different. I had a great time. The animators and all the different people at Disney offered to show me how certain things worked, and the ice cream in the dining room was excellent.”
He said the original designs for the film showed Bambi’s mother killed on camera, but Walt Disney “had the very good taste to ask for that to be changed.” He also noted that the film’s release was delayed for several months because of Pearl Harbor and that the studio received a lot of hate mail from hunters, who complained that the film “traumatized” the killing of deer.
Clockwise from left: Thumper (voiced by Peter Behn), Bambi (Donnie Dunagan) and Flower (Stan Alexander) in 1942’s “Bambi.”
Walt Disney/courtesy Everett Collection
After BambiDunagan’s parents divorced. He lived in several boarding schools, boxed and played football in high school and supported himself before joining the Marines in 1952 at the age of 18. He said he became the youngest drill instructor in their history and served three tours in Vietnam before retiring as a major in 1977.
Dunagan was a counterintelligence officer and Force Reconnaissance commander, and in addition to his three Purple Hearts, he received a Bronze Star, a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Device V, an Army Commendation Medal, and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals.
He kept his Bambi The gig was a secret at the time because he had “an aversion to show-offs and those who boasted about themselves.” He also didn’t want anyone to make fun of him or call him “Major Bambi”.
After his service, Dunagan worked for financial companies in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio and as CEO of Pace Corp. in Los Angeles.
When the Disney Company learned he was still alive, he was asked to participate in a DVD release of Bambiand he has spoken at conventions and festivals and as a company ambassador for years.
Survivors include his wife, Dana, whom he married in September 1992.
“I could work in the White House and the kids wouldn’t care,” he said. “But let someone say, ‘That guy over there was the face or voice of Bambi,’ and I’m immediately a foster grandfather to him. It’s just an incomparable joy and a real responsibility.”
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