Donnie Dunagan, the child actor who voiced Bambi in Disney’s 1942 classic and retired from the Marine Corps as a decorated major, died on November 4th at the age of 92. His agents confirmed that the cause was lung cancer. Dunagan spent more than two decades in the Marines without telling the men he led that he had been the voice of the famous fawn.
Dunagan was born on August 16th, 1934, in San Antonio, Texas. According to an archived biography on his old website, his family moved often before settling in Memphis. There, a neighbor taught him to tap dance, and he won a pair of local talent contests as a small child. A Hollywood scout spotted him at the second contest, and Dunagan signed a contract with RKO Pictures.
He made his film debut at four years old in the 1938 family drama *Mother Carey’s Chickens*. In 1939, he played Peter von Frankenstein, the son of Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, in *Son of Frankenstein*, appearing alongside Boris Karloff as the Monster and Bela Lugosi as Ygor. He took roles in *Tower of London* and *The Forgotten Woman* that same year, followed by uncredited appearances in *Vigil in the Night* and *Meet the Chump*. His seventh and final film was *Bambi*.
As Rolling Stone reported, Walt Disney personally selected Dunagan as the facial model for Bambi because of his brown eyes. He sat in front of a group of Disney animators who “asked me to look happy, look up, look sad, etc.” as they sketched the expressions of the white-tail deer, he recalled in a 2011 interview. He was then offered the voice role, and he called working on the film “the thrill of my young life.”
“As I have grown older, I’ve listened to people talk about it when they did not know I was a part of it,” Dunagan said of the film. “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.” His acting career ended with Bambi. His parents divorced, and he spent time in an orphanage and a boarding school before supporting himself with odd jobs, boxing, and football in high school, which earned him a football scholarship to the University of Alabama.
Dunagan volunteered for the Marines in the early Fifties and served in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, rising to the rank of major and earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. “I was blessed to be in a leadership role for 25 years, either in counterintelligence or training troops,” he said in 2005, “and if these animals I was leading had ever found out about Bambi — as much affection as I had for it — they’d have ridden me out on a rail.”
Watch Dunagan talk about voicing Bambi, working with Walt Disney, and keeping the role quiet through his Marine Corps career here:
"*" indicates required fields
“We were proud to represent a Marine, beloved by fans around the world,” his agents, Kris Jones and Nery Lemus of CelebWorx, said in a statement. “While he asked us (in his words) ‘not to be sad due to the great life I lived,’ it would be amiss not to share the impact that Donnie had on people when they met him. His love for life was shown through his encouragement. He knew how to inspire and inspired us to be the best we could be.”
After leaving the Marines, Dunagan stayed out of the spotlight for decades. In the early 2000s, some six decades after the film’s release, Disney tracked him down and asked him to take part in a DVD release of *Bambi*. He then returned to public life as an ambassador for the company, appearing at fan conventions and film festivals in his final decades.
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.