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Bambi Breaks his Silence
Perhaps the life of Donald Dunagan would have been different if he’d gotten credit for playing Bambi. Instead, he went on to become the youngest drill instructor in U.S. Marine Corps history.
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
By Shelley Gabert
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Buena Vista Home Entertainment
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Bambi, now
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Unlike most child actors who try to capitalize on their shining moments in the film business, Donald Dunagan left Hollywood at the ripe old age of seven and never looked back. Most remarkably, he did not talk about his acting days as an adult, keeping it a secret until recently that he was the voice of Bambi, the beloved deer in Walt Disney’s 1942 animated classic, which comes out for the first time today on DVD.
But now that the secret is out, Dunagan says the opportunity to revisit the film has been a welcome reminder of the life he once led. “All of this attention is wonderful, a really nice surprise,” explains the 71-year-old semi-retiree during a recent telephone interview with FilmStew from his home in central Texas. “Walt Disney was such a pioneer, a risk taker, and he was all over that film. He was the CEO, the leader, but he was also the artist and the visionary.”
“I’ve heard men who thought they could do anything they wanted in the forest bad mouth Bambi. To show fire started by careless hunters was brave, and Disney was really the first one in the industry to show an environmental issue like that.”
Although Disney wanted to go with mostly unknown child actors for Bambi, Dunagan had by that time already appeared in seven films, including 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, in which he starred opposite Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff as the son of Rowland Lee’s character. His curly blonde ringlets, longish face and huge, wide-set brown eyes turned out to be a perfect match for the Disney deer.
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Buena Vista Home Entertainment
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Former child star Dunagan
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Dunagan says the resemblance between himself and Bambi was deliberate, as Walt Disney wanted to make each of the forest animals a combination of human caricature and realistic physical movements. Alongside the five-and-a-half-year-old Dunagan during this process were Peter Behn, who had trouble remembering large chunks of his Thumper dialogue, and Cammie King Conlon, starring as Faline after appearing as the child of Rhett and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind.
“I remember being on a stool in front of these men sitting in a semicircle sketching away with their pencils as fast as they could,” Dunagan recalls. “One of the scenes I enjoy the most is when Faline sticks her head through the thicket and gives Bambi a deer kiss and he scrunches his face up in distaste.”
“The men told me, ‘Just pretend like you have just been given a dose of castor oil,’” he adds with a laugh. “I knew what that tasted like, so I squished my face up. But I couldn’t hold it very long.”
Although Dunagan went on to provide the voice of young Bambi, his contribution – like many other voiceover parts in the film – remained uncredited, preventing the nascent performer from being able to fully capitalize on it professionally. Soon enough, Dunagan became something of a show business orphan himself; the money he’d earned from acting was mismanaged and by the time he reached his early teens, he was working in a machine shop and living alone in a boarding house run by a World War II widow.
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Walt Disney Pictures
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Bambi, then
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“We were dirt poor before the movies and dirt poor after the movies,” Dunagan explains. “The money I earned wasn’t handled well and some people involved ended up living in Beverly Hills, while my mother and I were forced to move around a lot. Eventually, our family ruptured and all I can really say is that it was a very bad time.”
A natural athlete, Dunagan took up golf and caught the attention of a pro at Los Angeles’ Wilshire Country Club during an amateur driving contest. After winning the competition with a one iron, he started working in the pro shop, which paid substantially more than a comparable shift in a machine shop.
Dunagan was also a talented football player and eventually attended the University of Alabama on a scholarship. After transferring to Virginia Tech, he volunteered during the Korean War for the Marines and became the youngest drill instructor in the U.S. Marine Corps history.
“The Marine Corp was wonderful to me and it never broke a trust in 25 years,” says Dunagan, who rose to the rank of Sergeant by age 19 and retired as a Major in 1977. “At that time, it was run by World War II veterans who didn’t believe in war, who were intellectual and questioned the insanity of war.”
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Buena Vista Home Entertainment
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Bambi (Dunagan), Thumper (Behn)
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Throughout his military career, Dunagan says he never once thought seriously about returning to Hollywood, although he did act in Marine training films and was involved in several large amateur acting groups. Still, he never forgot his experience on Bambi and after the movie first came out on video, he found himself somewhat re-inspired. “Before Disney found out I was still breathing and doing push-ups, I’d shown Bambi to thousands of children,” he exclaims.
But even when he screened the film for example in the Panama Canal area, where he was aiding intelligence efforts, Dunagan never told the children through an interpreter that the voice they were listening to onscreen was his. He did so, he says, because he didn’t want to distract from their cinematic experience. “One of the joys of my life is to watch children when they get to take a break from grim life,” he says. “After a few moments of watching Bambi, they are swept into these human stories told through these wonderful animal characters.”
Three years ago, Dunagan lost his life savings in the Enron collapse and today must tutor children in order to help provide for himself and his second wife. But he’s positive about the future, one that took a decidedly unexpected turn last May when a friend of his wife’s was overheard at a local fundraiser by TV reporters when she stated, ‘Isn’t it funny that the former Marine played Bambi?’
As a result, Dunagan was interviewed on camera for the first time about his role and word soon reached Disney, who gladly enlisted him for participation in special sections of today’s two-disc Platinum Edition DVD. “I’m embarrassed that I kept my work on Bambi a secret,” Dunagan confesses. “But I was afraid to earn the nickname ‘Bambi,’ which just wouldn’t have worked given the type of jobs I had in the Marines.”
Now that he has stumbled back into the limelight, Dunagan says he is thrilled to be talking once more about a film whose simplicity and emotional center have provided it with such longevity. “There’s less than one thousand words in the film, but it’s the artistry and the endearments that make it stick,” he suggests.
“That scene where Bambi’s mother is killed is so powerful for its simplicity,” Dunagan continues. “We just hear the bang, without seeing it; but we are traumatized by that rifle shot. Then, when Bambi goes down, his father - the prince of the forest - comes to him with his huge rack of antlers and makes him get up. And really, that’s what we have to do in life when we face tragedy.”
| Considering that Dunagan went from a hard luck childhood to a Masters degree in Engineering Management from the University of Vermont and a Citizen of the Year/Military Sector award from the City of San Diego in 1977, and that he perseveres in the wake of cataclysmic Enron fallout, truer words have rarely been spoken. | |
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