Donnie Dunagan, the child actor who voiced Bambi in the original Disney animated classic and later served a decorated 25-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps, has died. He was 92.
Dunagan died Wednesday of lung cancer, author and film historian Tom Weaver reported.
Born Donald Roan Dunagan in San Antonio on Aug. 16, 1934, he moved with his parents, Warren and Louise, to Memphis. At age 3, he won a $100 prize tap-dancing in a talent contest, and an RKO talent scout in the audience arranged for the family to travel to Los Angeles by train. After an audition, he 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.
The blond, curly haired youngster brought sweetness to the 1939 Universal horror films Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London. Lee cast him as Peter von Frankenstein, son of Basil Rathbone's Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, and during production he often played checkers with Boris Karloff, who was in full monster makeup. In Tower of London, his Baby Prince was wed to Joan Carroll's Lady Mowbray in a comical arranged-marriage scene that nearly was cut over budget concerns.
His life changed when his mother answered a phone call from Walt Disney himself at the family's Westwood home. The studio chief wanted the boy to "help his artist put a child's expression on a deer," Dunagan recalled in a 2025 interview, so he and his mother drove to the new Disney lot in Burbank. He spent more than a year working on Bambi (1942), his seventh and final film.
For one of the movie's most emotional sequences, in which the young deer cries out for his mother after a hunter chases them through the woods, Dunagan needed guidance. "When I was told to say, with some stress, 'Mother .. Mother,' I must have not had the tone of fear that the story needed," he said in 2011. "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." Hardie Albright voiced Bambi as an adolescent.
Dunagan said the hardest part of the job "was being serious," recalling fondly the animators who showed him how things worked and the ice cream in the dining room. He noted that original drawings had Bambi's mother killed on camera before Walt Disney ordered the change, that the release was delayed months by Pearl Harbor, and that the studio received hate mail from hunters who complained the film "traumatized" the shooting of deer.
After Bambi, his parents divorced, and he lived in boarding homes, boxed and played football in high school and supported himself before joining the Marines in 1952 at 18. He said he became the youngest drill instructor in the Corps' history, served three tours in Vietnam and retired as a major in 1977. A counterintelligence officer and Force Recon Commander, he earned three Purple Hearts, 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.
Throughout his military service, Dunagan kept his Hollywood past secret, citing "a dislike for showoffs and those that boasted about themselves" and a fear of being mocked as "Major Bambi." "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. After the service, he worked for financial companies in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio and as CEO of the Pace Corp. in L.A. When Disney learned he was still alive, he participated in a DVD release of Bambi and appeared at conventions and festivals as a company ambassador for years.
Survivors include his wife, Dana, whom he married in September 1992. Reflecting on his legacy, he once said: "I could be working in the White House and children could care less. 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."
