Quotes

My mother and father were artistic people. My mother was a singer and a pianist. They enjoyed the opera and the theater and movies. And so they would take us kids to all of the wonderful functions at the Bijou Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wanted to be a stage actress. Then I could come home and impersonate all these people I had seen in the movies. I was an omnivorous reader as well. So, I memorized a lot of classics. The little old lady that I do actually with Tweety and Sylvester, I memorized lines from "The Old Woman Shows Her Medals". It's a play by J.M. Barrie. Oh my goodness, I just did so many impersonations of stars, and read William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde and "The Importance of Being Ernest". It was a very exciting life.

I'd hate to be stranded on a desert island, unless it were Hawaii, but I'd certainly enjoy seeing these films over and over until rescued.

I love everything I do with all of the parts that I do because there's a little bit of me in all of them. We all have anger and jealousy and love and hope in our natures. We try to communicate that vocally with just sketches that you see on the screen and make it come alive and make it human. That's what I enjoy doing.

I had already been working at Disney and Warner Brothers, doing a multiplicity of voices. Jay Ward and Bill Scott had this wonderful idea of a moose and a squirrel. My agent called and said, "Have you ever heard of Jay Ward?" and I said "No". He said, "Well, he wants to take you to lunch." So I met Bill and Jay at a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. that is no longer in existence. However, Jay knew precisely whom he wanted. He didn't want anybody else. So nobody ever auditioned for Jay. He just said, "I want June Foray".

[on celebrities being cast over professional voice actors] We are all doing supplementary parts while Cameron Diaz is getting paid $10 million. The stars receive millions of dollars for doing voices for animated films, and then there is the poor actor who has to struggle to make at least $15,000 a year just to keep his benefits. A lot of the young people--wonderful, good, solid voice actors--have families and are buying homes, and work is bad for them. Frankly, I don't think simply because a star's name is on it that is going to sell the film if it's not good. You get big stars doing live-action films, and if it's a flop, their appearance doesn't alter the basic outcome.

Once I was in a telephone booth--you know, they used to have them on the streets--anyway, Pat Buttram used to call me when he finished The Gene Autry Show (1950), and he would call me, every Halloween as Witch-Hazel, to find out what the witches were wearing. Well, that day I wasn't home, I had a studio call, so I went into one of these telephone booths and I called him, and I said, "What are the witches wearing this season?" And there were people waiting to get in! And they kept looking at each other--"What kind of nut is that?'"

I taught voice-overs at USC, a lot of the young people would say, "Hey Ms. Foray, listen!" And they did wonderful voices, but you'd get copy in front of them and they couldn't act. So I think it has to be inherent in you, to have that ability to act, whether you can do funny voices or different voices or not, you have to have that emotion, that's just born.

[on her first time working at Warner Bros.] I had seen Mel Blanc so many times at the studios, NBC and CBS when he was working in radio, but I had never met him. And here he was in all of his glory, with his mustache and balding head! And then [Michael Maltese] came in. Mike Maltese was [Chuck Jones' favorite writer, and he was the one who wrote Broom-Stick Bunny (1956), and as soon as I walked in, Mike Maltese said, "You're a Virgo!" And I said, "Well how did you know?" He said, "Well, I just know these things!"

[on Chuck Jones] Chuck Jones as a man was an intellectual; Chuck could quote Aristophanes or Mark Twain at the drop of a peg-board. Brilliant man, besides being handsome.

I always recorded first. [Mel Blanc] was in the studio with me, but I always recorded first, because sometimes they would speed up Mel's voice.

There were never any credits for voices. Walter Lantz was the first one who ever gave actors credit. And now that I think about it, and I look back and see these films I think 'Who did this? Who did that? I wonder who did it?' And I think everybody else feels the same way, and it's a shame. All the in-betweeners, the animators, the directors, the writers, everybody got credit, but the actors didn't. I guess we weren't that important. Except we were.

I never met Walt Disney, which is one of the saddest things in my life, because he my mentor at the time. He liked me so well he said 'Hire her for this, hire her for that.' Which they did. I think of Disney projects very nostalgically, but I always felt robbed that I never met Walt.