The boy who cried out for his mother in Disney’s “Bambi” spent a quarter-century in the Marine Corps without telling a soul there.
Donnie Dunagan, who provided the original voice of young Bambi in the 1942 animated classic, died Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, of lung cancer. He was 92. Word of his death came first from film historian and author Tom Weaver; his representatives at CelebWorx later confirmed it.
“We were proud to represent a Marine, beloved by fans around the world for his roles in ‘Bambi’ and ‘Son of Frankenstein,'” agents Kris Jones and Nery Lemus told Variety. He had asked them not to be sad, they said, because of the life he had lived. They described a man who rallied other veterans, loved his fans and, above all, loved his wife.
The Cry That Needed Real Fear
It started with a phone call. Dunagan’s mother picked up at their Westwood home to find Walt Disney himself on the line, looking for a child whose face could help his animators give a cartoon fawn a real boy’s expressions. The two of them soon made the drive to Disney’s new Burbank studio, Dunagan said in a 2025 interview.
Cast at six, he spent more than a year on the project, fitting other films around the recording sessions. His toughest assignment was the moment audiences never forgot, when the young deer calls out for his mother after gunfire scatters them through the forest. As he told it in 2011, his early attempts lacked real fright until a studio coach asked him to imagine his own mother lost and in danger. After that, he said, it came easily.
Hardie Albright voiced the adolescent Bambi. Dunagan went uncredited in the picture, though he is listed among the cast on IMDb. “Bambi” was his seventh and last film.
Four Bits Off Boris Karloff
Born Donald Roan Dunagan in San Antonio on Aug. 16, 1934, he was the son of Warren and Louise Dunagan, who later settled in Memphis, Tenn. There, at age three, he won $100 in a tap-dance competition — and an RKO scout watching from the crowd soon had the family on a train to Los Angeles.
His first screen role, won at an audition, came in Rowland V. Lee’s “Mother Carey’s Chickens” (1938), with Anne Shirley, Ruby Keeler and Walter Brennan in the cast. Lee brought the curly-haired blond boy back for 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein,” casting him as Peter, the son of Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein. During breaks he played checkers against Boris Karloff, still in his full monster makeup, and once took four bits from the star.
That same year Lee put him in “Tower of London,” where his Baby Prince is wed in an arranged chapel ceremony to Joan Carroll’s seven-year-old Lady Mowbray. Budget worries nearly got the comic scene cut, and Dunagan said in 2004 that he kept his part 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).
Afraid of Being Called ‘Major Bambi’
His parents divorced, and the Hollywood years ended. He lived in boarding homes, boxed and played football, and after high school, in 1952, he joined the Marines at 18. He became the youngest drill sergeant in Corps history.
He went on to serve three tours in Vietnam, working in counterintelligence and leading a Force Recon unit. By the time he retired as a major in 1977, he had earned a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts among other decorations. One wound, he said, was a bullet through his left knee.
Not once in that quarter-century did he mention the deer. He did not want to be teased as “Major Bambi,” and he told StoryCorps he had not even told his future wife. Years later he said keeping the secret from his closest Marine friends was among his deepest regrets, admitting he had not been brave enough to tell them.
When He Stopped Hiding Bambi
The film itself took years to find its audience. World War II had closed off European markets, and the movie drew hate mail from hunters. Only through repeated re-releases did it become one of the studio’s great animated successes. Dunagan praised Walt Disney for scrapping early drawings that would have shown the mother deer’s death on screen.
After leaving the Corps, he built a finance career that took him to New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio and eventually to the top job at Pace Corp. Late in life he stopped hiding the role and leaned into it, signing for fans at conventions and attending the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 75th anniversary screening of “Bambi” on May 15, 2017, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
His wife, Dana, whom he married in 1992, survives him.
“But I love it now when people realize this old jerk — still alive and was Bambi,” Dunagan told NPR in 2015.