The man who gave young Bambi his voice spent a quarter-century in the Marine Corps without telling a soul there about the deer.
Donnie Dunagan, the original voice of young Bambi in Disney’s “Bambi” (1942), died of lung cancer on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. He was 92.
Word of the death came first from film historian and author Tom Weaver, and his agents at CelebWorx, Kris Jones and Nery Lemus, confirmed it later. “We were proud to represent a Marine, beloved by fans around the world for his roles in ‘Bambi’ and ‘Son of Frankenstein,’” Jones and Lemus told Variety.
The agents said Dunagan had asked them not to be sad, because of the life he had lived. They described a man who rallied other veterans, loved his fans and, above all, loved his wife. His wife, Dana, survives him. They married in 1992.
Walt Disney on the Family Phone
It began with a telephone call to the family’s home. Dunagan’s mother picked up, and Walt Disney himself was on the line. The studio was looking for a child whose face could help animators give a cartoon fawn the expressions of a real boy, and mother and son drove out to Disney’s new Burbank studio, Dunagan recalled in a 2025 interview.
Dunagan was six when he was cast, and the job stretched more than a year, with his other films fitted around the recording sessions. The animators, he said in a 2011 interview, “asked me to look happy, look up, look sad, etc.” He called the picture “the thrill of my young life.”
How He Found Bambi’s Cry
The hardest thing they asked of him was the cry for his mother, the one that comes after gunfire scatters the deer through the forest. His early attempts had no real fright in them, he said in 2011, until a studio coach told him to imagine his own mother lost and in danger. After that, he said, it was easy.
Hardie Albright voiced the adolescent Bambi. Dunagan went uncredited in the picture, though IMDb lists him among the cast. “Bambi” was his seventh and last film, and it started slowly: World War II had closed off European markets, and hunters sent hate mail. Only through repeated re-releases did it become one of the studio’s great animated successes. Dunagan praised Disney for scrapping early drawings that would have shown the mother deer’s death on screen.
Checkers With the Monster
Donald Roan Dunagan was born in San Antonio on Aug. 16, 1934, the son of Warren and Louise Dunagan, who later settled in Memphis, Tenn. A neighbor there taught him to tap dance. He won a local talent contest that paid $100, and a Hollywood talent scout was watching from the crowd. The family signed a contract with RKO Pictures and soon boarded a train for Los Angeles.
He won his first screen role at an audition, in director Rowland V. Lee’s “Mother Carey’s Chickens” (1938), a debut that came at age four; the cast included Anne Shirley, Ruby Keeler and Walter Brennan. Lee brought the curly-haired blond boy back for 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein,” as Peter, son of Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein. Between setups, he played checkers against Boris Karloff, still in full monster makeup, and once took four bits off the star.
Lee cast him again the same year in “Tower of London,” where his Baby Prince was wed in an arranged chapel ceremony to Joan Carroll’s seven-year-old Lady Mowbray. Budget worries nearly cut the comic scene. Dunagan said in 2004 that his part survived only because Rathbone, fed up with losing scenes from the script, stood up for it. He also appeared in “The Forgotten Woman” (1939), George Stevens’ “Vigil in the Night” (1940) and “Meet the Chump” (1941).
The Secret He Called ‘Major Bambi’
His parents’ divorce ended the Hollywood years. He moved through boarding homes and took up boxing and football, and in 1952, after high school, he joined the Marines at 18. He became the youngest drill sergeant in Corps history. He served three tours in Vietnam, doing counterintelligence work and leading a Force Recon unit, and retired as a major in 1977 with a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts among his decorations. One wound, he said, was a bullet through his left knee.
For a quarter-century in uniform he said nothing about the deer, because he did not want to be teased as “Major Bambi.” He told StoryCorps that he had not told his future wife either. Years later he called the secret he kept from his closest Marine friends one of his deepest regrets, and said he had not been brave enough to tell them.
After the Corps, Dunagan built a finance career in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio, eventually reaching the top job at Pace Corp. Late in life he stopped hiding the role and leaned into it, signing for fans at conventions. On May 15, 2017, he attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 75th anniversary screening of “Bambi” in Beverly Hills, Calif.
“But I love it now when people realize this old jerk — still alive and was Bambi,” he told NPR in 2015.
In the 2011 interview, he put it another way: “As I have grown older, I’ve listened to people talk about it when they did not know I was a part of it. I grew to realize that Mr. Disney had let me become part of a neverending love story in this world. My debt to him is great.”
