Donnie Dunagan, who provided the voice of Bambi for the original Disney classic and acted alongside Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in two films before being awarded three Purple Hearts as a U.S. Marine, has died. He was 92.
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 mom answered a phone call from none other than Walt Disney himself at the family’s home in Westwood.
The studio chief wanted the kid to “help his artist put a child’s expression on a deer,” Dunagan recalled in a 2025 interview, so he and his mom drove to the new Disney lot in Burbank.
Before long, Dunagan was put to work on Bambi (1942), and he would spend more than a year on the animated film. In one of the movie’s most emotional sequences, his white-tailed character cries out for his mother after they are chased through the woods by a hunter.
“I remember this 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 coach, I think it was a nice lady at the studio, asked me how I would cry out loud if my own real mother was lost and in great danger. That made it easy.”
Bambi would be his seventh and last film.
During his quarter-century in the military, Dunagan said he never told anyone about his four years in Hollywood. “One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I didn’t have the courage to tell my close personal friends in the Marine Corps that I had been a part of the wonderful work of Mr. Disney,” he said.
Boris Karloff held Donnie Dunagan in his arms as Lionel Atwill looked on in 1939’s ‘Son of Frankenstein.’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Donald Roan Dunagan was born in San Antonio on Aug. 16, 1934. He moved with his parents, Warren and Louise, to Memphis, and when he was 3, he tap-danced in a talent contest, winning the $100 prize, huge money in those days. 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 Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, in the second sequel to James Whale’s 1931 classic. During production, he often played checkers with Karloff, who was in full makeup and dressed as the monster. (He said he won four bits off him once.)
In Lee’s Tower of London, Dunagan’s Baby Prince and Lady Mowbray (played by 7-year-old Joan Carroll) are wed in an arranged marriage ceremony in the St. John Chapel. Because of budget concerns, the comical scene nearly was excised from the movie.
“I think Basil Rathbone was responsible for me being in Tower of London,” he recalled in a 2004 interview. “He was angry that they kept cutting scenes out of the script. Not angry like rednecks get angry — he was a gentleman, always — but he was disturbed.”
Dunagan also appeared in The Forgotten Woman in 1939, then showed up in Vigil in the Night (1940), directed by George Stevens, and Meet the Chump (1941) while working on Bambi through early 1941. (Bambi as an adolescent was voiced by Hardie Albright.)
Dunagan said that the hardest part about Bambi “was being serious. I loved the studio. The people were very 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 great.”
He said that original drawings for the film had Bambi’s mom killed on camera, but Walt Disney “had the very good taste to direct that to be changed.” He also noted that the film’s release was delayed months because of Pearl Harbor and that the studio received lots of hate mail from hunters, who complained that the film “traumatized” the shooting 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 Bambi, Dunagan’s parents divorced. He lived in several boarding homes, boxed and played football in high school and supported himself before joining the Marines in 1952 at age 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 a Force Recon Commander, and in addition to his three Purple Hearts, he was awarded a Bronze Star, a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with V device, an Army Commendation Medal and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals.
He kept his Bambi gig a secret back then because he had “a dislike for showoffs and those that boasted about themselves.” He also didn’t want anyone mocking him or calling him “Major Bambi.”
After the service, Dunagan worked for financial companies in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio and as a CEO of the Pace Corp. in L.A.
When the Disney company learned he was still alive, he was asked to participate in a DVD release of Bambi, and he spoke at conventions and festivals and as an ambassador for the company for years.
Survivors include his wife, Dana, whom he married in September 1992.
“I could be working in the White House and children could care less,” he said. “But let someone say, ‘That dude over there was the face or voice of Bambi,’ and I am an immediate adopted grandfather to them. That is just an unmatchable joy and a real responsibility.”
