The admission suggests a man who judged the two halves of his life by different measures, and found the quieter one the more serious.
Donnie Dunagan, the actor who gave voice to Disney's Bambi and later served 25 years in the US Marine Corps, has died aged 92, The Guardian reports. The obituary places two careers side by side: a child performer in Hollywood's late 1930s and early 1940s, and a soldier who was awarded a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for bravery.
According to the report, Dunagan began his career in horror films, playing the curly blond-haired son of Basil Rathbone's Dr Frankenstein in Son of Frankenstein and appearing in Tower of London. He also featured in films including Mother Carey's Chickens, The Forgotten Woman, Vigil in the Night and Meet the Chump. He recalled playing checkers with Boris Karloff on set while the latter was in full monster makeup.
Bambi, whose release was delayed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, proved to be his final film. The Guardian reports that Dunagan said Bambi's mother originally dies on screen, though Disney altered this in the edit; he nonetheless received considerable hate mail from the hunting community afterwards. He joined the military in 1952 after college and spent a quarter of a century in uniform.
The detail that gives the story its weight is what he did not say. According to the report, Dunagan never disclosed his early career to his comrades, and later called it "one of the biggest regrets of my life 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". The admission suggests a man who judged the two halves of his life by different measures, and found the quieter one the more serious.
In 2015 he described the film's hold on audiences as "pure joy that both children and 80-year-olds can enjoy the film together", adding that children would care little if he worked in the White House, but that being identified as the face or voice of Bambi made him "an immediate adopted grandfather". He called that an unmatchable joy and a real responsibility.
The report gives no cause of death and no further detail on his postwar life or surviving family. What it does record is a career that ended almost before it began, and a second life in which the first was kept private until it could be spoken of as a regret.
