Donnie Dunagan, who played Bambi in the Walt Disney classic and played Frankenstein’s son opposite Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, has died at the age of 92.
Dunagan was six years old when he was cast as the voice of the young deer in animation’s most heartbreaking chapter. He remembers the experience in the recording booth as easy and relaxed, with rudimentary technology and notes from an assistant director instructing him to pretend his own mother had died while acting out Bambi’s reaction to his mother being killed by a hunter.
The actor recalled that Bambi’s mother died on screen, but Disney changed that in the edit. Nonetheless, Dunagan subsequently received considerable hate mail from the hunting community.
Bambi, whose release was delayed following the attack on Pearl Harbor, ended up being Dunagan’s final film. He began his career in horror films Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London, playing the curly blond son of Rathbone’s Dr. Frankenstein, as well as in films such as Mother Carey’s Chickens, The Forgotten Woman, Vigil in the Night and Meet the Chump.
He remembers often playing checkers with Karloff on set, while the latter was in full makeup and dressed as a monster.
After college, Dunagan joined the Army in 1952 where he spent 25 years and for which he received a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for valor. He never revealed his early career to his comrades, but said that “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.”
In 2015, he recalled the experience as “pure joy that kids and 80-year-olds can enjoy the movie together. I could work at the White House and the kids wouldn’t care. But for someone to say, ‘That guy over there was the face or voice of Bambi,’ and I’m an immediate adoptive grandfather to them. It’s just an incomparable joy and a real responsibility.”
Gn entert
